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.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Cardio Heart Connect: Protocol for a Randomized Trial of a Commercially Available mHealth Fitness Intervention for Cardiac Rehabilitation After Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement

Background: Despite ample evidence of the benefits of cardiac rehabilitation (CR), few transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) patients participate. Commercially available mobile health offers an opportunity to deliver activity-promotion content to populations that are challenged to participate in CR. This study aims to test the efficacy of clinically controlled, commercially available fitness programming for improving physical activity and cardiovascular health outcomes designed to be initiated while patients are on waitlists for traditional CR. Methods: The Cardio Heart Connect study is a hybrid type I effectiveness-implementation trial aiming to enroll N=200 patients who have been placed on a cardiac rehab waitlist following a TAVR procedure from the University of Colorado Hospital Heart and Vascular Center. Participants will be randomized 1:1 to the Cardio Heart Connect intervention with commercially available fitness or attention control, designed to control for technology access. At baseline, post-intervention (8 weeks), and follow-up (12 months), we will assess the primary outcome of participants? daily steps as measured by smartwatch accelerometer and secondary outcomes of interest including functional capacity (Duke Activity Status Index; VO2max), quality of life (Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire), and cardiovascular health status (Life Essential 8). In addition, we will use mixed methodologies to evaluate the implementation of intervention using the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance (RE-AIM) Framework. Conclusions: Commercially available fitness programs have the potential to provide more accessible opportunities for patients recovering from TAVR to engage in physical activity and may be preferred due to their customizability, convenience, and ease of scheduling. Overall, this study will provide insight into the use of commercial mHealth to promote activity following TAVR.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Robustness Verification of Recurrent Neural Networks with Abstraction Refinement

arXiv:2606.12490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Certified local robustness verification for recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is challenging because approximation errors introduced by nonlinear relaxations can propagate through recurrent connections and accumulate over time. As a result, scalable linear bound propagation methods often become overly conservative and fail to certify inputs that are in fact robust, especially when many pre-activation intervals cross zero. We propose an abstraction-refinement framework for RNN verification that partitions such intervals to remove the dominant relaxation error: on each refined branch, ReLU becomes exact, and smooth activations such as tanh and sigmoid admit substantially tighter linear envelopes. To control the combinatorial cost of splitting in long sequences, we introduce a SHAP-guided timestep selection strategy that ranks hidden states by their contribution to the verification objective and refines only the most critical timesteps in temporal order. Experiments on CIFAR10 and MNIST stroke benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in verification success and robustness-margin tightness over abstraction-only baselines, while exposing clear runtime trade-offs between ReLU and tanh models.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

EARS: Explanatory Abstention for Reliable Sub-Agent Modeling in Large-scale Multi-Agent Systems

In large-scale enterprise settings, centralized multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly adopted, in which a coordinator delegates user requests to lightweight, domain-specialized sub-agents. While this architecture improves modularity, scalability, and cost efficiency, its reliability depends not only on accurate routing but also on sub-agents' ability to calibrate their responses to capability constraints. In particular, sub-agents built on smaller fine-tuned models often struggle with such calibration, leading them to over-answer ambiguous, underspecified, misrouted, or unsupported requests and produce hallucinated outputs instead of actionable feedback. To address this challenge, we present EARS (Explanatory Abstention for Reliable Sub-Agent Modeling), a production-oriented framework that reframes sub-agent abstention as an inter-agent communication protocol: a sub-agent does not merely abstain, but exposes an actionable failure state to the coordinator. EARS curates human-agent interaction data using an ensemble of calibrated LLM-as-a-Judge models, producing structured abstention labels and rationales under a taxonomy of sub-agent failure modes. These data are used to fine-tune sub-agents to detect failure conditions and return rationales for coordinator-level clarification, rerouting, or fallback. We evaluate EARS in a large-scale production e-commerce assistant supporting enterprise business intelligence workflows. EARS improves the overall response pass rate from 68.5% to 78.9%, demonstrating that sub-agent-side explanatory abstention improves MAS reliability.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Rule2Text: A Framework for Generating and Evaluating Natural Language Explanations of Knowledge Graph Rules

Knowledge graphs (KGs) can be enhanced through rule mining; however, the resulting logical rules are often difficult for humans to interpret due to their inherent complexity and the idiosyncratic labeling conventions of individual KGs. This work presents Rule2Text, a comprehensive framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate natural language explanations for mined logical rules, thereby improving KG accessibility and usability. We conduct extensive experiments using multiple datasets, including Freebase variants (FB-CVT-REV, FB+CVT-REV, and FB15k-237) as well as the ogbl-biokg dataset, with rules mined using AMIE 3.5.1. We systematically evaluate several LLMs across a comprehensive range of prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, variable type incorporation, and Chain-of-Thought reasoning. To systematically assess models' performance, we conduct a human evaluation of generated explanations on correctness and clarity. To address evaluation scalability, we develop and validate an LLM-as-a-judge framework that demonstrates strong agreement with human evaluators. Leveraging the best-performing model (Gemini 2.0 Flash), LLM judge, and human-in-the-loop feedback, we construct high-quality ground truth datasets, which we use to fine-tune the open-source Zephyr model. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in explanation quality after fine-tuning, with particularly strong gains in the domain-specific dataset. Additionally, we integrate a type inference module to support KGs lacking explicit type information. All code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/idirlab/KGRule2NL.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Infectious Disease Forecasting via Physics-Informed Machine Learning

Infectious disease transmission evolves as a dynamic process shaped by biological mechanisms, population behavior, and intervention policies, yet public health responses are often driven by lagging indicators. Accurate short- and long-term disease forecasting is essential for the timely deployment of intervention strategies, healthcare capacity planning, and uncertainty-aware, risk-informed decision-making. To address this challenge, three broad classes of forecasting models have traditionally been used: statistical, machine learning, and mechanistic approaches. However, each of these modeling paradigms faces fundamental limitations. In particular, traditional statistical models often lack the flexibility needed to capture complex disease dynamics, machine learning approaches require large, high-quality data streams, and mechanistic models are notoriously difficult to calibrate. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for forecasting infectious disease dynamics. Our approach simultaneously forecasts new case and hospitalization counts, along with other key epidemiological quantities such as the time-varying reproduction number. This is achieved through the design of a machine learning model and estimation strategy regularized by a system of differential equations that encode disease dynamics of the SIHR model, thereby bridging the gap between purely data-driven and mechanistic models. We demonstrate the proposed methodology through in-depth numerical studies and an application to COVID-19 data collected in the state of South Carolina.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Recruitment, Retention Approaches and Community Engagement in the THRIVE pilot Trial: Lessons Learned from a Food is Medicine Trial

Background: Recruitment of underrepresented populations, including Black and Hispanic populations, for Food is Medicine (FIM) and cardiovascular trials, may pose significant challenges. Methods: We implemented a multi-component recruitment approach for the THRIVE (AdapTive personalized dietitian coacHing and messaging with pRoduce prescrIptions to improVE healthy dietary behaviors) pilot trial to engage primarily Black and Hispanic adults in a Food is Medicine for hypertension intervention. The recruitment approaches included community engagement at approximately 40 community events (cultural festivals and neighborhood gatherings); partnerships with 8 community and faith-based service hubs and food distribution sites; recruitment through safety net primary care clinics, digital outreach via the study website, and social media campaigns; and direct recruitment at places of worship. We report lessons learned from the community engagement process, recruitment efficiency, representativeness, and retention outcomes. Results: Within 6 months, the enrollment target was exceeded by 40%, with an accrual index of 1.04. Over 1,000 individuals were reached through the direct-to-community engagement process, while faith-based partnerships engaged about 900 adults. There were 2,673 visits to the study webpage, and social media achieved 12,259 impressions with 399 clicks. About 95% of participants resided within 10 miles of the faith-based recruitment sites. Face-to-face engagement at the food distribution sites within faith-based organizations or community service hubs outperformed digital methods. Faith leader endorsements and follow-up in-person meetings (following unsuccessful email outreach) dramatically increased recruitment. Regarding retention, pre-randomization attrition was 6%, and 82% of participants completed the study. Conclusion: Culturally tailored, community-engaged recruitment grounded in faith-based and local community partnerships, was highly effective in engaging Black and Hispanic populations in this FIM cardiovascular trial. This provides a replicable model for implementing equitable and sustainable cardiovascular health interventions.

07.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Parental body mass index and offspring childhood body size and eating behaviour: A structural equation modelling analysis in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study

Authors:

by Tom A. Bond, Tom A. McAdams, Nicole M. Warrington, Laurie J. Hannigan, Espen Moen Eilertsen, Ziada Ayorech, Fartein A. Torvik, George Davey Smith, Deborah A. Lawlor, Eivind Ystrom, Alexandra Havdahl, David M. Evans Background The intergenerational transmission of obesity-related traits could propagate an accelerating cycle of obesity, if parental adiposity causally influences offspring adiposity. The extent to which intergenerational obesity associations are due to such causal effects, as opposed to genetic confounding (inheritance), is unclear. We aimed to establish whether associations between parental peri-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and offspring birth weight (BW), BMI until 8 years of age, and 8-year-old eating behaviour are due to genetic confounding. Methods and findings Data were from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study, a prospective population-based birth cohort born between 1999 and 2009 at 50 out of 52 hospital maternity units in Norway. We compared the strength of the associations of maternal pre-pregnancy BMI versus paternal BMI during pregnancy, with offspring outcomes including birth weight and BMI assessed between age 6 months and 8 years of age, and appetite-related eating behaviour traits assessed at age 8 years via the Child Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (CEBQ), adjusting for potential confounders including parity, parental/grandparental language group and parental age, smoking, education and income). We then used an extended children of twins structural equation model (SEM) to quantify the extent to which associations were due to genetic confounding. Up to 85,866 children (51.3% male) were included in linear regression models, whereas SEM models included up to 50,999 children. Maternal BMI was more strongly associated than paternal BMI with offspring BW, but the maternal-paternal difference decreased for offspring BMI after birth. Greater parental BMI was associated with obesity-related offspring eating behaviours. SEM results indicated that genetic confounding did not explain the association between parental BMI and offspring BW, but explained the majority of the association with offspring BMI from 6 months onwards. For 8-year BMI, genetic confounding explained 79% (95% CI [62, 95]; p = 1.9 × 10−12) of the covariance with maternal BMI and 94% (95% CI [72, 113]; p = 2.7 × 10−14) of the covariance with paternal BMI. Limitations of this study include selective recruitment and attrition, potential bias due to parental assortative mating, and that findings may not generalise beyond high-income country settings with high obesity prevalence. Conclusions We found strong evidence that parent–child BMI associations may primarily be due to genetic confounding. When considered alongside prior evidence, this finding may argue against a strong causal effect of maternal or paternal adiposity on childhood adiposity via intrauterine or periconceptional mechanisms.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Stepwise Token Selection for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models

In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), inference cost is largely dominated by the visual token prefix rather than the language backbone, making token reduction a key factor for improving efficiency. Existing approaches typically assign independent importance scores to visual tokens and retain a fixed number of top-ranked tokens, implicitly assuming token independence and a uniform compression ratio across inputs. In this work, we reformulate visual token pruning as a sequential decision-making process. Specifically, we introduce a pointer-style selection mechanism that iteratively chooses informative tokens, conditioning each decision on previously selected ones, and dynamically determines when to stop via a learned termination action. This enables joint optimization of both the selected subset and its size. To enable end-to-end training under standard language modeling objectives, we design a differentiable relaxation based on a variance-preserving noise interpolation scheme, allowing gradients to propagate through the discrete selection process. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-v1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms fixed-ratio baselines across different compression levels. Under aggressive pruning that removes 88.9% of visual tokens, our method preserves 94.6% of the original accuracy while achieving a 1.88x speed-up in prefill latency.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

RippleBench: Capturing Ripple Effects Using Existing Knowledge Repositories

arXiv:2512.04144v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Targeted interventions on language models, such as unlearning or model editing, aim to modify specific information, but their effects often propagate to related, unintended areas (e.g., removing virology content may degrade performance on allergies); these side-effects are commonly referred to as the ripple effect. We introduce RippleBench-Maker, an automatic pipeline that retrieves semantic neighbors of any source concept from a knowledge repository and generates multiple-choice questions at varying semantic distances. We instantiate this framework using WikiRAG, an open-source RAG system over English Wikipedia, to construct RippleBench-WMDP-Bio (584 seed topics, 352,961 questions), and evaluate eight unlearning methods on Llama3-8B-Instruct. All eight exhibit accuracy drops that are largest near the unlearned target and decay with semantic distance, each with a distinct propagation profile. We replicate these findings across Mistral-7B, Zephyr-7B, and Yi-34B; cross-model delta curves are nearly identical, suggesting ripple effects are a property of the unlearning method rather than the base model. We validate all major pipeline stages using a four-experiment Mechanical Turk study (5,200+ responses, 61 workers). We release all code, data, and infrastructure.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Block-wise Codeword Embedding for Reliable Multi-bit Text Watermarking

Recent multi-bit watermarking methods for large language models (LLMs) prioritize capacity over reliability, often conflating decoding with detection. Our analysis reveals that existing ECC-based extractors suffer from catastrophic false positive rates (FPR), and applying rejection thresholds merely collapses detection sensitivity (TPR) to random guessing. To resolve this structural limitation, we propose BREW (Block-wise Reliable Embedding for Watermarking), a framework shifting the paradigm to designated verification. BREW employs a two-stage mechanism: (i) blind message estimation via independent block voting, followed by (ii) window-shifting verification that rigorously validates the payload against local edits. Experiments demonstrate that BREW achieves a TPR of 0.965 with an FPR of 0.02 under 10% synonym substitution, demonstrating that the high-FPR issue is not an inherent trade-off of multi-bit watermarking, but a solvable structural flaw of prior decoding-centric designs. Our framework is model-agnostic and theoretically grounded, providing a scalable solution for reliable forensic deployment.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Unsupervised Causal Abstractions Discovery

arXiv:2606.19594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal abstractions formalize when a high-level structural causal model (SCM) captures the interventional behavior of a lower-level SCM. Existing applications of this notion largely follow a hypothesis-testing paradigm: an expert proposes a candidate high-level model and then evaluates if the low-level system implements it. We study the complementary problem of learning a high-level model directly from low-level measurements. Our contributions leverage hypotheses from low-rank causal discovery, and can be summarized as follows: (1) we show that observations generated by a low-rank graph induce latents that form a causal abstraction, (2) we provide identifiability results about these latents, and (3) we propose a practical objective to learn this high-level SCM.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Determinants of non-utilization of insecticide-treated nets among children under five in Rwanda: analyses of the 2024 Rwanda malaria indicator survey

Background Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) are effective for preventing malaria among children under five years, who bear a disproportionate burden of malaria. This study assessed the prevalence and determinants of ITN non-utilization among children under five in Rwanda using data from the 2024 Rwanda Malaria Indicator Survey (RMIS).Methodology This cross-sectional study utilized nationally representative data from the 2024 RMIS. Analyses were restricted to children under five residing in households that owned at least one ITN. The outcome was non-utilization of ITN, defined as not sleeping under an ITN the night preceding the survey. Survey-weighted descriptive statistics were used to estimate the prevalence of ITN non-utilization. Factors associated with non-utilization were identified using a survey-weighted Poisson regression model. Adjusted prevalence ratios (aPRs), 95% confidence intervals and p-values were reported.Results A total of 1,979 children were included in the study. The weighted prevalence of ITN non-utilization among children under five years was 20.11% (95% CI: 17.81 - 22.63). After adjusting for other factors, children aged 2 - 3 years were associated with an 83% higher prevalence of ITN non-utilization compared with those aged [&le;]1 year (aPR = 1.83, 95% CI: 1.423 - 2.352, p < 0.001). Compared with households that owned only one ITN, children in households with three or more ITNs were associated with a 76% lower prevalence of ITN non-utilization (aPR = 0.24, 95% CI: 0.171 - 0.332, p < 0.001). Children living in households with 5 - 7 members were associated with an 87% higher prevalence of ITN non-utilization compared with those in households with 1 - 4 members (aPR = 1.87, 95% CI: 1.476 - 2.358, p < 0.001).Conclusion The findings suggest that ITN utilization among children is influenced not only by household access to nets but also by household composition and dynamics that shape the allocation and use of available preventive resources.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

RAVEN: Long-Horizon Reasoning & Navigation with a Visuo-Spatio-Temporal Memory

Long-term robot deployment requires a compact and scalable memory that preserves fine-grained visual semantics, grounds observations in space and time, and enables efficient storage and retrieval. In this paper, we propose RAVEN, an agentic memory system for long-horizon robotic question answering and navigation. RAVEN stores visual embeddings with pose and time in a vector database, and grounds retrieval in a spatial map to answer queries and navigate to goals. By operating directly on visual embeddings, RAVEN avoids lossy image-to-text captioning and enables accurate semantic, spatial, and temporal retrieval at scale. Across several simulated and real-world video question-answering benchmarks, RAVEN consistently surpasses caption-based memory systems and matches frontier VLMs on long-horizon tasks at 10$\times$ lower retrieval cost. Finally, we instantiate RAVEN on a Unitree Go1 robot for the task of long-horizon navigation for natural language goal-reaching, and show successful deployment over several large indoor environments.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Is Stochastic Gradient Descent Effective? A PDE Perspective on Machine Learning processes

arXiv:2501.08425v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of E, Li and Tai (2017), the underlying structure of such processes can be understood via parabolic PDEs of Fokker-Planck type, which are at the core of our analysis. Even if Fokker-Planck equations have a long history and a extensive literature, almost nothing is known when the potential is non-convex or when the diffusion matrix is degenerate, and this is the main difficulty that we face in our analysis. We identify two different regimes: in the initial phase of SGD, the loss function drives the weights to concentrate around the nearest local minimum. We refer to this phase as the drift regime and we provide quantitative estimates on this concentration phenomenon. Next, we introduce the diffusion regime, where stochastic fluctuations help the learning process to escape suboptimal local minima. We analyze the Mean Exit Time (MET) and prove upper and lower bounds of the MET. Finally, we address the asymptotic convergence of SGD, for a non-convex cost function and a degenerate diffusion matrix, that do not allow to use the standard approaches, and require new techniques. For this purpose, we exploit two different methods: duality and entropy methods. We provide new results about the dynamics and effectiveness of SGD, offering a deep connection between stochastic optimization and PDE theory, and some answers and insights to basic questions in the Machine Learning processes: How long does SGD take to escape from a bad minimum? Do neural network parameters converge using SGD? How do parameters evolve in the first stage of training with SGD?

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

AI Researchers Must Help Lead Arms Control to Mitigate Military AI Risks

arXiv:2606.11533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The advancement of AI capabilities compels researchers and the public to be more aware of its potential worldwide impact. A pressing near-term concern is the regulation of military AI applications. Armament manufacturers and defense contractors are increasingly investing in AI capabilities and forging partnerships with AI companies, creating a burgeoning coalition that demands military leaders, arms control diplomacy experts, and AI researchers collaborate to ensure a safer future. While AI researchers often focus on the long-term implications of superintelligent AI, this approach may not adequately address the immediate challenges posed by AI in military applications. Success requires acknowledging and mitigating the emerging risks of frontier AI models that plan to be integrated into defense applications, like military AI systems. Arms control has reduced past catastrophic risks, so lessons learned from nuclear deterrence can guide AI safety and security research towards innovations in verification and diplomacy. AI researchers, however, must assist in leading the technical research that clearly defines and alleviates instability in military settings. Given these new responsibilities and the lack of sufficiently reliable solutions, we argue that AI researchers must take a leading role in advancing arms control research to minimize risk in military AI applications.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

On a stochastic phase-field model of cell motility with singular diffusion

arXiv:2601.05881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study existence of solutions in the variational sense for a class of stochastic phase-field models describing moving boundary problems. The models consist of stochastic reaction-diffusion equations with singular diffusion forced by a phase-field. We investigate both the case of an independently evolving phase-field and of coupled phase-field evolution driven by a viscous Hamilton-Jacobi equation. Such systems are used in the modelling of single-cell chemotaxis, where the contour of the cell shape corresponds to a level set of the phase-field. The technical challenge lies in the singularities at zero level sets of the phase-field. For large classes of initial data, we establish global existence of probabilistically weak solutions in $L^2$-spaces with weights which compensate for the singularities.

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

Neuromorphic Wireless Split Computing with Resonate-and-Fire Neurons

arXiv:2506.20015v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neuromorphic computing offers an energy-efficient alternative to conventional deep learning accelerators, particularly for real-time processing of time-series data. However, many edge applications, such as wireless sensing and audio recognition, generate streaming signals with rich spectral features that are not effectively captured by conventional leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) spiking neurons. This paper investigates a wireless split computing architecture that employs resonate-and-fire (RF) neurons with oscillatory dynamics to process time-domain signals directly, eliminating the need for costly spectral pre-processing. By resonating at tunable frequencies, RF neurons extract time-localized spectral features while maintaining low spiking activity. This temporal sparsity translates into significant savings in both computation and transmission energy. Assuming an OFDM-based analog wireless interface for spike transmission, we present a complete system design and evaluate its performance on audio classification and modulation classification tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed RF-SNN architecture achieves comparable accuracy to conventional LIF-SNNs and ANNs, while substantially reducing spike rates and total energy consumption during inference and communication.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Dialogue to Discovery: Attribute-Aware Preference Elicitation for Conversational Product Search Assistants

Conversational product search assistants offer a more expressive, natural, and interactive alternative to traditional keyword-based product search. With limited screen space, showing only a few items increases the need for precise preference elicitation, which can prolong conversations, leading to user frustration and session abandonment. Conversely, rushing to recommend items without a clear understanding of preferences risks poor matches and a degraded user experience. We present Dialogue to Discovery (D2D), an attribute-oriented preference elicitation framework that dynamically exploits the structure of product attributes to efficiently steer conversations toward the user's desired item. D2D adaptively prioritizes the most informative queries and strategically times product recommendations, reducing premature or off-target suggestions that harm engagement. To evaluate D2D, we curate three datasets from the Amazon Reviews corpus. In simulated conversations modelled using a multi-factor utilitarian patience framework, D2D achieves a 22.2-29.9% improvement in target-finding accuracy, 6.6-16.1% reduction in abandonment, and 27.5% shorter average conversations over the state-of-the-art baselines. A complementary user study further confirms significant gains in both user satisfaction and perceived efficiency.

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

Vision-Reasoning-Guided Occlusion Removal from Light Fields

Occlusion-robust scene recovery remains a major challenge in computational imaging, particularly in natural environments where dense foreground vegetation severely limits visibility. We propose a vision-reasoning-guided light field occlusion removal framework that combines the visibility recovery capability of light field integration (LFI) with the semantic reasoning capacity of vision-language models (VLMs). Multi-view observations are first integrated via LFI to suppress foreground occlusions and produce an initial visibility-enhanced representation. A VLM is then incorporated as a conditional semantic prior to restore degraded structures and recover fine details, guided by the observed measurements. To improve recovery consistency and reduce hallucination artifacts, we introduce a multi-sample fusion strategy that aggregates multiple generated hypotheses into a unified estimate. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving the highest average SSIM across four synthetic light field benchmark scenes (4-Syn) and strong generalization across structured and unstructured acquisition settings. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining physical imaging constraints with vision-language reasoning for robust perception under severe occlusion, with applicability to search-and-rescue and exploratory robotic navigation.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CSPO: Constraint-Sensitive Policy Optimization for Safe Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to maximize expected return while satisfying safety constraints, typically modeled as Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). While primal-dual methods scale well to deep RL, they often suffer from delayed constraint correction, leading to oscillatory behavior and prolonged safety violations. In this paper, we propose Constraint-Sensitive Policy Optimization (CSPO), a first-order primal-dual method that incorporates local constraint sensitivity into policy updates. CSPO augments the primal objective with a constraint-sensitive correction derived from the shortest signed distance to the safety boundary, enabling smarter recovery steps back to safety, compensating for delayed Lagrange multiplier updates, reducing oscillations near the boundary, and preserving the KKT solutions of the original constrained problem. Experiments on navigation and locomotion benchmarks demonstrate that CSPO achieves faster safety recovery and high reward preservation, resulting in higher constrained returns compared to state-of-the-art primal-dual and penalty-based methods

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

Model Stealing Through the Lens of Model Multiplicity

arXiv:2606.15493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model stealing attacks, where adversaries create high-fidelity surrogate models, are a significant threat to the intellectual property of machine learning services. Conventional wisdom suggests these surrogates could provide adversaries with economic leverage comparable to the original service providers. This paper challenges this assumption by evaluating model stealing attacks beyond mere fidelity to the target model. Because query-based extraction provides only partial supervision of the target's input-output behavior, the surrogate is not uniquely identified: many near-optimal surrogates can achieve comparable fidelity while differing in deployment-relevant properties. Instead of performing a classic learning-based model stealing attack, we compute the Rashomon Set (i.e., the set of almost-equally-accurate models) of surrogate models, and evaluate its diversity using multiplicity metrics (ambiguity, discrepancy, and Rashomon Capacity) and group fairness metrics. Across tabular, medical imaging, and NLP tasks, our experiments on real-world datasets reveal that despite exhibiting similar fidelity to the target model, surrogate models can display significant variances in other critical performance metrics. These findings cast doubt on the presumed equivalence between high-fidelity surrogates and the target model in practical deployment scenarios.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

WeaveLA: Event Driven Cross-Subtask Latent Memory Weaving for Repetitive Robot Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies have achieved remarkable single-step manipulation, yet they remain brittle precisely where each stage depends on what was just completed. The core issue is structural: short-window VLAs lack an explicit channel for rouxting information across sub-task boundaries, and existing memory-augmented variants either write at every frame, retrieve from demonstration-time stages, or fire at sub-goal events without performing an explicit sub-task-to-sub-task hand-off into the action expert. We identify the sub-goal completion event as the natural temporal unit for cross-subtask memory hand-off, and present WeaveLA (Weave Latent memory for Vision-Language-Action policies), a cross-subtask memory interface that, on top of a frozen VLA backbone, compresses each completed segment into latent tokens via query-driven attention pooling and routes them directly into the action-generation path of the next sub-task. This event-triggered, action-side design preserves the base policy's short-window interface while adding a lightweight cross-subtask channel. Through stratified evaluation on RoboMME with a $\pi_{0.5}$ backbone, WeaveLA's gains land exactly where the channel is needed: on the hardest repetition slice (SwingXtimes, $N{=}3$), success rises from $0\%$ to $47.8\%$, while single-execution episodes remain unchanged. Per-episode paired analysis confirms the gains are confined to tasks whose causal structure requires cross-subtask information.

23.
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.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

As You Wish: Mission Planning with Formal Verification using LLMs in Precision Agriculture

arXiv:2606.18519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Though robotic systems are now being commercialized and deployed in various industries, many of these systems are highly specialized and often require an advanced skill set to operate and ensure they perform as instructed. To mitigate this problem, we recently introduced a mission planner leveraging LLMs to synthesize mission plans in precision agriculture based on mission descriptions provided in natural language. While the system demonstrates impressive performance, it also suffers from the inherent ambiguities of natural language. In this paper, we extend our system to address this issue by introducing multiple feedback loops in the planning architecture that leverage linear temporal logic (LTL) to ensure the mission planning system meets the specifications formulated by the user while still using natural language. To mitigate potential bias, this is achieved by using two different commercial LLMs in charge of the specification and verification subtasks. Through extensive experiments, we highlight the strengths and limitations of integrating mission verification into a fully autonomous pipeline, particularly regarding an LLM's ability to generate valuable LTL formulas, and show how our proposed implementation addresses and solves these challenges.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

ComplexDesign: sequence-hallucination design of protein binders bridging multiple proteins

Motivation: Designing multichain protein complexes requires coordinating the folding of component proteins with the formation of their interfaces. The existing methods, however, remain limited in their ability to satisfy these requirements simultaneously, especially for trimeric and tetrameric complexes. As an important practical scenario, designing a binder that bridges two target proteins into a ternary complex requires flexibility in the relative arrangement of the two targets, adding an additional challenge to existing design methods. Results: We present ComplexDesign, a hallucination-based approach for multichain protein design. ComplexDesign performs structure-prediction-guided sequence optimization to simultaneously fold each protein chain and form inter-chain interactions that bind them together. To provide the flexibility required to appropriately arrange these target proteins, ComplexDesign introduces a specialized masking mechanism that enables exploration of possible relative arrangements rather than being limited to the predefined ones. Across a comprehensive set of benchmarks with various chain lengths, ComplexDesign outperformed existing methods in the unconditional design of dimers, trimers, and tetramers, achieving a high design success rate exceeding 50%, supporting its capability for multichain complex design. Furthermore, in the case of multi-target binder design, ComplexDesign produced high-confidence, self-consistent ternary complexes for 8 out of 10 target pairs. These results establish ComplexDesign as an effective tool for multichain protein design, with particular utility for designing binders that bridge two target proteins. Availability and implementation: The source code of ComplexDesign will be made publicly available upon publication.