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) 2026-06-15

EvoTrainer: Co-Evolving LLM Policies and Training Harnesses for Autonomous Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.03108v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous LLM training is often framed as recipe search, which leaves the training harness largely static. This limitation sharpens in agentic RL, where shifting bottlenecks and scalar rewards mask diverse failure modes. We introduce EvoTrainer, an autonomous training framework that co-evolves LLM policies and training-side harnesses through empirical feedback: it diagnoses rollout-level evidence, revises diagnostics, backtests interventions, and accumulates reusable skills. Evaluated on mathematical reasoning, competitive-programming code generation, and repository-level software engineering, EvoTrainer matches or exceeds the human-engineered RL references under the same data, codebase, and evaluation protocol, with the largest gain on long-horizon agentic SWE. Trajectory analyses show that retained strategies diverge across domains, evolving diagnostics prevent invalid high-scoring branches from being promoted, and reusable skills shape later search. Autonomous LLM RL should move beyond recipe search toward joint evolution of policies and the training harnesses that interpret them.

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

Small Experiments, Cheaper Decisions: A Case Study in Staged Promotion for Micro-Pretraining

Short pretraining runs can reduce experimental cost, but they can also over-promote configurations that only look strong at tiny budgets. We study an auditable staged-promotion protocol for a fixed micro-pretraining runner on two heterogeneous host blocks: Windows A100 and Linux L40S. Starting from twelve prior-screened configurations, we use staged budgets of 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 60 minutes, and 12 hours, with frozen promotion rules before expensive continuations. The early screens are intentionally treated as unstable: the 5- and 10-minute rankings are host-sensitive, and the eventual 12-hour top-ranked condition is not the mean-best condition at the replicated 10-minute gate. Because seed ranges differ across stages, these changes are operational promotion evidence, not within-seed curves. A replicated 60-minute gate keeps the Staged Factorial Screening bridge reference in the promoted set, where it ranks first in all four 60-minute host-seed cells. In the final 12-hour confirmation package, the bridge condition ranks first in all four host-seed cells across two seeds; the greedy comparator does not meet the frozen 0.010 val_bpb near-equivalence rule; and the cheaper d8/ar48 (depth-8, aspect-48) sentinel does not meet the frozen 0.020 mean-gap rule. The executed 12-hour branch spends 144 GPU-hours, and the full staged protocol records 169.2 training GPU-hours including screening stages. Continuing all four 60-minute candidates would spend 192 GPU-hours, while continuing all nine replicated 10-minute candidates would spend 432 GPU-hours. The latter numbers are accounting counterfactuals for unrun continuations, not evidence that skipped candidates could not have overtaken the reference. The result is a bounded cost-allocation finding, not a claim of global optimality, capacity-normalized superiority, or superiority over adaptive hyperparameter optimization methods.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Qualitative Review of GenAI-Based Methods for Data Generation and Augmentation in Industrial Computer Vision Applications

AI-driven computer vision applications require a profound database to ensure predictable behaviors and performance. Such predictable behaviors are especially important for industrial applications in gaining trust from users. However, such a database is not readily available in industrial applications, and its acquisition is not trivial either. Active learning methods can be applied to ramp up data within a project deployment to iteratively increase the database, and thus the application predictability. Unfortunately, we observe that this often leads to a loss of user trust in the application, which is difficult to regain once lost. This leads to a "chicken-and-egg" dilemma in which neither the database nor the application is developed. In this work, we review state-of-the-art methods and approaches to further boost the database the initial active data ramp-up phase. Here, we focus on recent advancements in GenAI-based data generation and augmentation methods and review their adaptability on an industrial computer vision classification use case. Although we observe a potential for automatic data ramp-up, we also see a domain miss match in between the source (training environment) and target (industrial use-case) - regarding context defined in natural language and object characteristics.

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

A Unified Framework for Runtime Verification and Model-Based Diagnosis in LOLA

arXiv:2606.23720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an integrated framework that unifies runtime verification and model-based diagnosis within the stream specification language LOLA. By encoding system descriptions, component health states, and observations into a single stream-based formalism, the approach enables continuous, online fault localization directly alongside fault detection, without requiring separate toolchains. The framework supports both time-invariant and transient faults, and naturally accommodates nondeterministic observations.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Fermionic Hamiltonian engineering with local control

arXiv:2606.17158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum simulators enable the exploration of complex quantum phenomena in condensed-matter systems by reproducing their dynamics on controllable quantum devices. However, experimental constraints often restrict the class of Hamiltonians that can be realized natively. Hamiltonian engineering addresses this limitation by expanding the set of accessible target Hamiltonians from a fixed system Hamiltonian defined by the hardware. We introduce a new framework for fermionic Hamiltonian engineering based on conjugating free evolution under the system Hamiltonian with sequences of experimentally feasible local fermionic unitaries. The required sequences and free-evolution times are obtained efficiently via a linear program. By interleaving system evolution with these local unitaries, our method realizes effective time evolution under a broad class of target Hamiltonians, with intrinsic robustness to finite-pulse-time errors. In particular, we demonstrate that arbitrary complex tunnelling coefficients can be realized, constrained only by the connectivity of the underlying system Hamiltonian. We illustrate this capability by engineering the dynamics of the non-interacting Harper-Hofstadter model on a 1088-mode lattice and an interacting Fermi-Hubbard chain with complex tunnelling coefficients. By construction, our approach avoids the continuous energy absorption inherent to Floquet engineering.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

CoDaLoMic: An R package for modeling microbiome compositional and longitudinal data

by Irene Creus-Martí, Andrés Moya, Francisco J. Santonja In this paper we present CoDaLoMic, an R package for analyzing longitudinal and compositional microbiome datasets. The CoDaLoMic package implements three models specifically designed for the analysis of microbiome data that are both compositional and longitudinal. Unlike many existing methods that focus solely on pairwise interactions, CoDaLoMic also captures interactions among groups of bacteria, providing a more robust methodological framework for studying microbial relationships at the community level. In addition, the package facilitates the analysis of microbiome variability in relation to host health status and allows for the identification of groups of taxa that exhibit similar temporal dynamics. Working with time series data makes it possible to understand not only the current state of a microbial community but also its dynamics over time, which is essential for identifying patterns of ecological succession, detecting events of dysbiosis or recovery, and inferring potential causal relationships between taxa. On the other hand, focusing on interactions among groups of bacteria, rather than analyzing only pairwise relationships, enables a more integrated and functionally meaningful view of the microbiome. Many key ecological functions are the result of the collective behavior of functionally related groups of taxa. Two datasets have been considered in CoDaLoMic, one real and one simulated. The real dataset contains the information of the genera present in the microbiome of the Blatella germanica cockroach at 105 time points. The simulated dataset is defined taking Lotka-Volterra structure into account. CoDaLoMic is available at CRAN.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SoftMoE: Soft Differentiable Routing for Mixture-of-Experts in LLMs

arXiv:2606.17952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures enable scaling LLM parameters under a fixed inference budget by activating only a small subset of experts via top-$k$ routing. While this preserves causality and suits autoregressive language models, the discrete top-$k$ operator is not differentiable, forcing a fixed number of active experts per input and resulting in inefficient use of computation. We propose SoftMoE, which replaces discrete routing with a truncated soft top-$k$ LapSum relaxation, allowing gradient-based optimization of expert routing. We further parameterize the mean number of active experts per layer and impose a global budget constraint, enabling the model to learn how to allocate expert capacity across layers. SoftMoE remains fully compatible with autoregressive modeling and achieves performance comparable to or better than sparse MoE on language modeling and downstream tasks, while activating significantly fewer experts. Notably, the learned allocation is highly non-uniform, with later layers activating more experts. The source code is publicly available$^\dagger$.

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

Geometry-Preserving Encoder/Decoder in Latent Generative Models

arXiv:2501.09876v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative modeling aims to generate new data samples that resemble a given dataset. When using diffusion models for this task, one of the main challenges is solving the problem in the input space, which tends to be very high-dimensional. To address this, recent approaches solve diffusion models in the latent space through an encoder that maps from the data space to a lower-dimensional latent space, improving training efficiency and achieving state-of-the-art results. The variational autoencoder (VAE) is the most commonly used encoder/decoder framework in this domain, known for its ability to learn latent representations and generate data samples. In this paper, we introduce a novel encoder/decoder framework with theoretical properties distinct from those of the VAE, specifically designed to preserve the geometric structure of the data distribution. We demonstrate the significant advantages of this geometry-preserving encoder in the training process of both the encoder and decoder. Additionally, we provide theoretical results proving convergence of the training process, including convergence guarantees for encoder training, and results showing faster convergence of decoder training when using the geometry-preserving encoder.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

TMPRSS2-Coagulation Nexus: A Novel Molecular Link Revealed by Pairwise Correlation Analysis Following AstraZeneca (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) Vaccination in a Nigerian Cohort

Background: While haematological and coagulation changes following AstraZeneca vaccination have been described, the molecular mechanisms linking TMPRSS2 expression to coagulation remain underexplored, particularly in African populations. Methods: In this case-control study, 102 adults (51 vaccinated with AstraZeneca >=6 months prior, 51 unvaccinated controls) aged 18-65 years in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, were evaluated. Full blood count (Sysmex XN-1000), PT/aPTT (Erba Mannheim), RNA concentration, and qRT-PCR for ACE2/TMPRSS2 (normalized to GAPDH) were performed. Pearson correlations and t-tests were conducted (SPSS v26, p

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Truncated Wigner dynamics of biclique quantum spin glasses

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20187v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum spin glasses are often considered testbeds for studying quantum optimization algorithms and as such have been the subject of various quantum advantage claims. Here we investigate the near adiabatic dynamics of biclique quantum spin glasses within the (discrete) truncated Wigner approximation (TWA). Benchmarks on small systems show that TWA recovers sample-to-sample fluctuations of the Edwards-Anderson order parameter, over a wide range of annealing times, with increasing fidelity when the system size increases. We extract critical exponents from the Binder cumulant in line with theoretical expectations, reproducing recent quantum experiments. The computational cost of the method is minimal and it can easily be applied to tens of thousands of qubits.

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

Distill Once, Adapt Life-Long: Exploring Dataset Distillation for Continual Test-Time Adaptation

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to maintain model performance under evolving target domains by adapting online without labeled data. However, practical deployments often cannot retain the source dataset due to privacy or licensing constraints, and purely source-free CTTA methods tend to become unstable under long-term distribution shift, suffering from compounding self-training errors and catastrophic forgetting. We introduce DO-ALL (Distill Once, Adapt Life-Long), a plug-and-play framework that revisits source information in a compact and privacy-conscious form via Dataset Distillation (DD). Before deployment, DO-ALL performs DD to produce a small set of synthetic distilled anchors that summarize the source distribution. During adaptation, each target sample is matched with its most semantically aligned anchor, which provides a stable reference for various CTTA via source replay, representation alignment, and manifold-smoothing regularization. DO-ALL can be seamlessly integrated into existing CTTA algorithms, consistently improving long-term robustness across CIFAR100-C, ImageNet-C, and the CCC benchmark. This demonstrates the potential of leveraging DD to enable stable and continuous adaptation without retaining raw source data. The code is available at https://github.com/blue-531/DOALL.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Exotic critical states as fractional Fermi seas in the one-dimensional Bose gas

arXiv:2602.17656v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Critical quantum field theories occupy a central position in modern theoretical physics for their inherent universality stemming from long-range correlations. As an example, the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) describes a wealth of one-dimensional quantum systems at low temperatures. Its behavior is deeply rooted in the emergence of an effective Fermi sea, leading to power-law correlations and Friedel oscillations. A promising direction to realize systems exhibiting novel universal behavior beyond TLL is through the generalization of the underlying Fermi sea. In this Letter, we show that fractional Fermi seas with reduced occupancy arise in an integrable Bose gas driven out of equilibrium by cyclic changes in interactions from repulsive to attractive. The correlation functions feature signatures of criticality incompatible with a conventional TLL, suggesting a novel critical phase. Our predictions, based on Generalized Hydrodynamics, are directly relevant to cold atoms.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Towards Personalized Federated Learning for Dysarthric Speech Recognition

arXiv:2606.13253v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech recognition is challenging for dysarthric speakers. While federated learning (FL)-based ASR can be an effective tool for protecting privacy, it suffers from heterogeneity issues caused by speaker variability. Forcing all speakers to share the same model components can be suboptimal under such heterogeneity, making personalization a promising direction; however, related research on dysarthric speech remains limited. To this end, this paper explores two aggregation strategies to achieve personalization, including the parameter-based averaging strategy and the embedding-based averaging strategy. Experiments on UASpeech and TORGO show that the proposed methods outperform the baseline regularized FedAvg by statistically significant WER reductions of up to 0.99% absolute (3.15% relative) on UASpeech and 0.56% absolute (4.73% relative) on TORGO, respectively.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Global high-resolution mapping of seagrass to support conservation

Authors:

Seagrass ecosystems underpin coastal biodiversity1 and provide vital ecosystem services, including shoreline protection2, food security3 and climate mitigation4. Despite growing recognition as a nature-based climate solution, seagrasses are among the least mapped and most poorly understood vegetated coastal ecosystems5. Here we present, to our knowledge, the first global 10-m spatial resolution maps and change analysis of seagrass extent in clear, shallow coastal waters, derived from 4.75 million Sentinel-2 MSI satellite images for two periods (2019–2020 and 2023–2024). Using a deep-learning classifier trained on curated reference data, we identified 148,506 km2 of seagrass globally, including 5,961 km2 of intertidal and 142,545 km2 of subtidal areas. Sixty-nine per cent of global seagrass extent is concentrated in The Bahamas, Cuba, the USA, Australia and Indonesia, yet only 21% of seagrass areas are located within marine-protected areas. Over the 4 years of the study, 5,969 km2 (4%) of seagrass was lost, and an additional 6,221 km2 (4.2%) was degraded from dense to sparse cover in tropical regions. Our findings identify seagrass meadow hotspots and vulnerable regions to inform conservation and climate policy. Global high-resolution mapping shows widespread seagrass loss and degradation since 2019, with most meadows outside protected areas, highlighting urgent conservation and climate-policy needs.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Extrema of microscopically slowed-down Gaussian fields

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a family of Gaussian fields whose covariance structure exhibits an inhomogeneous, microscopic slowdown and it interpolates between a $\log$ profile (for a certain interpolation parameter $\alpha=0$) and a $\log\log$ profile (when the interpolation parameter is $\alpha=1/2$). We consider both one dimensional such objects (which we call {\it Branching Brownian Motions in a cooling environment}) as well as higher dimensional, spatial fields. We identify the correct centering of the maximum at time $T$ and prove tightness of the recentered maximum. While the exponent in the first-order growth varies linearly with $\alpha$, giving a leading order of $T^{1-\alpha}$, the second-order correction exhibits a phase transition at $\alpha=1/3$.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Age-related changes in acoustic cue use for speech-in-speech perception

Authors:

Acoustic cues such as pitch and spatial location allow listeners to attend to a target speaker and ignore competing talkers, aiding speech recognition in background noise. Diminished ability to utilize acoustic cues for speech stream segregation may thus contribute to older adults' challenges hearing in noise. Adults aged 18-74 completed a speech-in-speech identification task with three conditions containing 1) only pitch cues (fundamental frequency), 2) only spatial cues (interaural time differences; ITDs), and 3) both pitch and spatial cues for segregating a target talker from competing talkers. Hearing thresholds at standard and extended high frequencies (EHFs), auditory brainstem responses (ABRs), and digit span scores were acquired to examine the influence of sensory and cognitive factors on use of each acoustic cue for speech-in-speech recognition. Significant differences were observed between cue condition scores indicating that use of the available cue(s) drove performance. ABR metrics were not a significant predictor but digit span scores significantly predicted scores on all three cue conditions. Working memory abilities therefore set a baseline for participants' speech-in-speech recognition regardless of the acoustic content. Hearing thresholds at standard frequencies significantly predicted scores on the Pitch condition. EHF hearing thresholds better predicted Spatial and Both Cue condition performance, suggesting that EHF thresholds represent auditory processing important for coding ITDs. Age group analysis revealed that older adults (aged 40+) performed significantly more poorly on all cue conditions of the speech-in-speech recognition task relative to younger adults. Age-related changes in auditory sensory processing may therefore impair older adults' speech-in-noise perception by reducing their ability to use acoustic cues for segregating target and competing speech.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Forecasting Is Not Attribution: Localizing Decoder Bypass in Graph-Based Neural Marketing Mix Models

arXiv:2606.12687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Marketing mix models are used to forecast business outcomes and to attribute those outcomes to marketing channels, but these goals are not equivalent. We study a failure mode in graph-based neural MMM called attribution bypass: a high-capacity decoder can obtain low forecasting error through target autoregression, dense communication, co-movement, context, or latent memory while failing to route counterfactual sensitivity through the graph used as the attribution object. We introduce DICE-MMM as a bounded diagnostic and training framework. We do not claim that observational neural MMM identifies causal effects. Instead, DICE separates three questions often conflated in graph-based MMM: graph recovery, forecasting accuracy, and whether the trained decoder's perturbation-induced influence is graph aligned. Stage 1 trains a graph encoder with a restricted graph-mediated decoder. Stage 2 freezes the selected encoder and trains a graph-safe latent decoder whose cross-node communication must pass through the supplied graph. Decoder use is evaluated with CIG, AR-CIG, and graph-swap tests. Across controlled R/d/T swaps and an external multi-graph rawlog stress test, DICE improves stable graph recovery over CausalMMM. The experiments show that forecasting accuracy is not an attribution certificate: in a sparse-target benchmark, no-graph and full-graph decoders achieve MSE@7 around 0.004 while AR-CIG nAUPRC remains near or below zero, whereas an oracle graph reaches 0.807 +/- 0.129 at comparable MSE. Frozen graph-swap localizes the bottleneck: the same DICE-hard-trained decoder moves from nAUPRC -0.044 +/- 0.006 under learned graph inputs to 0.894 +/- 0.027 with the oracle graph. The contribution is a stress test and failure-localization framework showing that low MSE can hide attribution bypass and that the unresolved bottleneck is graph-support selection, not forecasting or decoder capacity.

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

Mixing Makes Markovian Contexts Cheap for Linear Bandits

arXiv:2603.12530v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap'' perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses and leverages mature techniques from the linear bandit literature, such as those for misspecification and adversarial corruption. However, this reduction crucially relies on the independence of contexts and does not extend to settings with temporally correlated (e.g., Markovian) contexts, which arise frequently in practice. Motivated by applications with temporally correlated availability, we extend this perspective to linear bandits with Markovian context processes, where the action set evolves via an exogenous Markov chain. Our main contribution is a reduction that applies under uniform geometric ergodicity. We construct a stationary surrogate action set to solve the problem using a standard linear bandit oracle, employing a delayed-update scheme to control the bias induced by the nonstationary conditional context distributions. We further provide a phased algorithm for unknown stationary distributions that learns the surrogate mapping online. In both settings, we obtain a high-probability worst-case regret bound matching that of the underlying linear bandit oracle in sufficiently fast mixing regimes. We then validate our results on a real-world instance, where we show practical gains over a LinUCB baseline.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

SAFformer:Improving Spiking Transformer via Active Predictive Filtering

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer notable advantages in biological plausibility and energy efficiency, making them promising candidates for building low-power Transformers. However, existing Spiking Transformers largely adhere to a passive reactive paradigm, which struggles to focus on task-relevant information and incurs substantial computational overhead when processing redundant visual data. To overcome this fundamental yet underexplored limitation, we propose SAFformer, a novel Spiking Transformer architecture based on an active predictive filtering paradigm. Inspired by the brain's predictive coding mechanism, SAFformer actively suppresses predictable signals and focuses on salient visual features. Extensive experiments show that SAFformer establishes new state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS. Remarkably, on ImageNet-1K, it achieves 80.44% Top-1 accuracy with only 26.58M parameters and an energy consumption of 5.88 mJ, demonstrating an exceptional balance between accuracy and efficiency.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Faithful by Construction: Claim-Anchored Attribution for Multi-Document Summarization

Authors:

End-to-end large language models (LLMs) produce fluent multi-document summaries but remain prone to hallucination, and the attributions they offer are typically coarse (whole documents or passages) and generated post hoc, leaving each summary statement hard to verify. We revisit the modular Extract–Select–Rewrite paradigm and recast its intermediate representation as the unit of attribution. We present CAMS, a Claim-Anchored Multi-document Summarization framework that (i) extracts atomic claims with token-level provenance from every source document, (ii) clusters equivalent claims across documents while flagging inter-source conflicts, (iii) selects a support-aware and salient subset, and (iv) rewrites the selection into a summary in which every sentence is anchored to a support-checked claim that links back to one or more source spans. Because content is localized before it is realized, the pipeline is attribution-oriented by construction and faithfulness-oriented by construction: it structurally preserves fine-grained, multi-source traceability while using support-aware selection, constrained rewriting, and verification to encourage, rather than guarantee, factual faithfulness. We evaluate quality, faithfulness, and localization on MultiNews, analyze conflict handling on DiverseSumm, and test zero-shot transfer on WCEP, using a two-regime protocol that separates reference-free citation quality from gold-aligned localization accuracy, and we add an evaluator-decoupled audit that tests citation precision with a support model never used for selection or verification. CAMS matches strong end-to-end and span-attribution baselines on summary quality while substantially improving faithfulness and citation precision, lifting multi-source attribution accuracy by roughly two-thirds, and exposing a controllable faithfulness–coverage trade-off that end-to-end models leave implicit.

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

Manifold GCN: Diffusion-based Convolutional Neural Network for Manifold-valued Graphs

arXiv:2401.14381v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose two graph neural network layers for graphs with features in a Riemannian manifold. First, based on a manifold-valued graph diffusion equation, we construct a diffusion layer that can be applied to an arbitrary number of nodes and graph connectivity patterns. Second, we model a tangent multilayer perceptron by transferring ideas from the vector neuron framework to our general setting. Both layers are equivariant under node permutations and the feature manifold's isometries. These properties have led to a beneficial inductive bias in many deep-learning tasks. Furthermore, they enable novel, more flexible feature designs. Numerical examples on synthetic data and an Alzheimer's classification application on triangle meshes of the right hippocampus demonstrate the usefulness of our new layers: While they apply to a much broader class of problems, they outperform task-specific state-of-the-art networks.

22.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-17

General-purpose chatbots outperform clinical AI tools on physicians’ real-world questions

Authors: Unknown Author

Specialized clinical AI tools are entering medical practice with little independent testing. In a head-to-head evaluation across two public benchmarks and real questions from physicians, three general-purpose frontier large language models outperformed two leading clinical AI tools, which performed no better than Google search AI overview.

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

Dropout Neural Network Training Viewed from a Percolation Perspective

arXiv:2512.13853v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we investigate the existence and effect of percolation in training deep Neural Networks (NNs) with dropout. Dropout methods are regularisation techniques for training NNs, first introduced by G. Hinton et al. (2012). These methods temporarily remove connections in the NN, randomly at each stage of training, and update the remaining subnetwork with Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The process of removing connections from a network at random is similar to percolation, a paradigm model of statistical physics. If dropout were to remove enough connections such that there is no path between the input and output of the NN, then the NN could not make predictions informed by the data. We study new percolation models that mimic dropout in NNs and characterise the relationship between network topology and this path problem. The theory shows the existence of a percolative effect in dropout. We also show that this percolative effect can cause a breakdown when training NNs without biases with dropout; and we argue heuristically that this breakdown extends to NNs with biases.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

\texttt{Range-Arithmetic}: Verifiable Deep Learning Inference on an Untrusted Party

arXiv:2505.17623v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Verifiable computing (VC) has gained prominence in decentralized machine learning systems, where resource-intensive tasks like deep neural network (DNN) inference are offloaded to external participants due to blockchain limitations. This creates a need to verify the correctness of outsourced computations without re-execution. We propose \texttt{Range-Arithmetic}, a novel framework for efficient and verifiable DNN inference that transforms non-arithmetic operations, such as rounding after fixed-point matrix multiplication and ReLU, into arithmetic steps verifiable using sum-check protocols and concatenated range proofs. Our approach avoids the complexity of Boolean encoding, high-degree polynomials, and large lookup tables while remaining compatible with finite-field-based proof systems. Experimental results show that our method not only matches the performance of existing approaches, but also reduces the computational cost of verifying the results, the computational effort required from the untrusted party performing the DNN inference, and the communication overhead between the two sides.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Function-Vector Heads Are Two Populations: Writers and Cancellers in In-Context Learning

Authors:

Function-vector (FV) heads are identified by the magnitude of their causal contribution to in-context rule tasks, and the resulting top set is treated as a single functional class. We show this hides a sign structure. Under a sign-preserving criterion (refined direct logit attribution, validated head by head with path patching) the FV population splits into two opposing groups: writers push the rule-correct logit up, cancellers push it down, and ablating both together moves the readout less than the sum of the two. The split is causal and reproducible. It holds in all but two of the fifteen (model, task) cells we test, spanning three architectures and six Pythia scales, and a sign-shuffle null rejects the single-class account in all but one of the six main cells. It is also invisible to magnitude-only ranking, which surfaces whichever group locally dominates and misses the other, so any function vector or ablation built that way silently averages a promoting and a suppressing mechanism. Cancellers are not attention sinks, induction heads, or copy-suppression heads, and their causal effect is larger than that of magnitude-matched non-FV controls. Zero-ablating them recovers $+0.13$ to $+0.29$ nats on the correct label in every main cell, and shifts accuracy by $+2$ to $+7$ pp in the same direction.