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.LG) 2026-06-15

LoMC: Localized Multidirectional Correction for Refusal Suppression in Routed Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.13709v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study controlled post-training refusal suppression in routed MoE and hybrid-MoE foundation models, aiming to increase non-refusal target-response behavior while preserving general capability under a compact intervention footprint. Existing broad direction-based edits can perturb general-purpose computation, whereas support-only expert edits often lack sufficient capacity to correct heterogeneous refusal representations. To address this limitation, we introduce Localized Multidirectional Correction (LoMC), a support-gated intervention framework that follows a support-then-correction execution order: it first identifies a compact edit support, then aggregates prototype correction directions into layer-wise correction directions, and finally applies rank-one layer-wise correction only within the selected support. By using the edit support as a structural gating constraint, LoMC increases correction capacity without expanding the intervention scope. Experiments on text-only and multimodal safety benchmarks across four routed backbones show that LoMC substantially improves non-refusal target-response behavior while maintaining general capability under a compact intervention footprint.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Reaffirming a Challenge to Bohmian Mechanics

arXiv:2509.06584v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In our recent work, we reported the first measurement of the speed of tunnelling particles using a coupled waveguide system. The measured speed is operationally defined through a comparison of two orthogonal motions in a coupled waveguide system, is compatible with the standard definition of dwell time and with the Büttiker-Landauer tunnelling time, and does not presuppose a trajectory picture. Here we respond to objections raised in comments, referee reports, preprints, and articles. We distinguish two questions that are often conflated: whether Bohmian mechanics reproduces the measured density, and whether the standard guiding equation assigns the correct state of motion to the particles. The first point follows under the usual quantum equilibrium assumptions. The second is a separate physical assumption, since the standard guiding equation does not follow from the Schrödinger equation alone. We argue that, in the evanescent regime, the state of motion assigned by the standard guiding equation is in disagreement with the measured speed. To make the distinction explicit, we also present a bidirectional Bohmian model that reproduces the same stationary density while assigning finite speeds compatible with the speed inferred in the evanescent regime.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Project Ariadne: Prompt-Conditioned Route Generation for Synthesis Planning

arXiv:2606.24184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrosynthetic planning seeks to connect a target molecule to commercially available starting materials through a multistep route. Classical planners construct such routes by iteratively applying single-step reaction models within a search procedure; constrained variants often require specialized algorithms or architectural changes. Direct route generation reframes retrosynthesis as sequence generation, but existing direct-generation methods still train separate models for different planning specifications. We introduce Ariadne, a decoder-only route generator that represents the target, optional constraints, and route in one prompt-completion sequence. On the RetroCast/PaRoutes mkt-cnv-160 benchmark family, one 24-layer checkpoint follows route-depth and required-starting-material prompts: adding the corresponding prompt fields raises Solv-0 by 13.7 points for depth constraints and 31.2 points for required-leaf constraints. Ariadne also improves over DESP, a bidirectional search planner, on required-leaf Top-10 and Solv-0 in 24 GPU-minutes versus 6.8 GPU-hours. On standard reconstruction, Ariadne is comparable to DMS Explorer XL at about half the reported inference time. Across additional target-only benchmarks, Ariadne's clearest gains are on route-holdout reconstruction, whereas AiZynthFinder MCTS remains stronger on several Solv-0 comparisons. These results extend sequence generation from specialist retrosynthesis models to prompt-conditioned structural route generation. We release the codebase and training scripts to support further work, but do not introduce Tier-1–3 route checkers; those remain the main bottleneck before models of this kind can become useful to experimental chemists.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Active Inference for Adaptive Traffic Signal Control in Noisy Nonstationary IoT Environments

arXiv:2606.13698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban traffic signal control at IoT-instrumented intersections must remain effective under sensor occlusion, weather attenuation, and nonstationary demand. Conventional controllers degrade under these conditions, and learned policies remain difficult to audit. To address these challenges, we propose an active inference controller for a four-arm signalized intersection that dynamically selects phases by minimizing expected free energy (EFE) over Gaussian beliefs about per-direction congestion levels, yielding a fully traceable decision pipeline. We benchmark the controller in a SUMO traffic simulator against a rule-based heuristic and a deep Q-network (DQN) across four scenarios that progressively increase noise and nonstationarity, spanning sensor occlusion, adverse weather, and stochastic accidents. Across 100 independent random evaluations per scenario, active inference attains the lowest idle times and CO2 emissions in the noisiest scenarios (56,977 s and 29.12 kg vs. 71,741 s and 30.56 kg for DQN). These gains come at a modest cost in bus priority service rate and phase switch frequency.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Beyond the Smile: A Hybrid Convolutional VAE for Crypto Volatility Surfaces

arXiv:2606.16961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a convolutional variational autoencoder for cryptocurrency implied-volatility surfaces, together with a deployable predictor that combines it with a quadratic smile re-fit through a deterministic per-tenor routing rule. Trained on 6,034 fully-filled hourly Binance Options surfaces of BTC and ETH spanning May-October 2023 and parameterised on a common $6 \times 7$ tenor-delta grid, the model attains a hidden-cell surface-completion RMSE in the 0.94-1.56 vol-point range across both markets and mask rates 10-50%. The hybrid predictor attains 0.83 vol points at 50% masking against 7.00 for the smile re-fit alone, an eightfold reduction obtained at no additional inference cost. Under structurally-correlated hole patterns that emulate the withdrawal of an entire tenor of strikes, the smile re-fit incurs 9.6-13.1 vol points of error while the learned model remains at 1.5-1.9, isolating a regime in which the generative model is the only viable predictor. Joint training on BTC and ETH improves the in-distribution model on both markets by 9-27% relative to the better-performing single-symbol counterpart, indicating a substantially shared vol-surface manifold across the two largest cryptocurrencies over the observation window. The hybrid is calendar- and butterfly-arbitrage-free at the listed strikes, a property that the parametric smile re-fit alone fails at high mask rates. The per-snapshot reconstruction error of the trained model flags the late-October ETF-anticipation rally and the August $17$, $2023$ flash crash as elevated-error periods without supervision. All training and evaluation infrastructure is released to support reproducible follow-on work.

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

Robust Instruction Compliance in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.12655v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in real-world use cases may need to adapt to external natural language instructions that interrupt ongoing behavior and conflict with long-horizon objectives. However, conditioning rewards on instructions introduces a fundamental failure mode as Bellman updates couple value estimates across instruction contexts, leading to inconsistent values when instructions interrupt macro-actions. We propose Macro-Action Value Correction for Instruction Compliance (MAVIC), which corrects Bellman backups at instruction boundaries by correcting the incoming instruction objective and restoring the continuation value under the current objective. Unlike reward shaping, MAVIC modifies the bootstrapping target itself, enabling consistent value estimation under stochastic instruction switching within a unified policy. We provide theoretical analysis and an actor-critic implementation, and show that MAVIC achieves high instruction compliance while preserving base task performance in increasingly complex cooperative multi-agent environments.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Sharing quantum indistinguishability with multiple parties

arXiv:2512.15199v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum indistinguishability of non-orthogonal quantum states is a valuable resource in quantum information applications such as cryptography and randomness generation. In this article, we present a sequential state-discrimination scheme that enables multiple parties to share quantum uncertainty, in terms of the max relative entropy, generated by a single party. Our scheme is based upon maximum-confidence measurements and takes advantages of weak measurements to allow a number of parties to perform state discrimination on a single quantum system. We review known sequential state discrimination and show how our scheme would work through a number of examples where ensembles may or may not contain symmetries. Our results will have a role to play in understanding the ultimate limits of sequential information extraction and guide the development of quantum resource sharing in sequential settings.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

An Improved Generative Adversarial Network for Micro-Resistivity Imaging Logging Restoration

An improved GAN-based imaging logging image restoration method is presented in this paper for solving the problem of partially missing micro-resistivity imaging logging images. The method uses FCN as the generative network infrastructure and adds a depth-separable convolutional residual block to learn and retain more effective pixel and semantic information; an Inception module is added to increase the multi-scale perceptual field of the network and reduce the number of parameters in the network; and a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block are added to combine the channel attention. The multi-scale module adds a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block, which combine the channel attention mechanism and the residual block to achieve multi-scale feature extraction. The global discriminative network and the local discriminative network are designed to gradually improve the content and semantic structure coherence between the restored parts and the whole image by playing off each other and the generative network. According to the experimental results, the average structural similarity measure of the five sets of imaged logging images with different sizes of missing regions in the test set is 0.903, which is an improvement of about 0.3 compared with other similar methods. It is shown that the method in this study can be used for the restoration of micro-resistivity imaging log images with good improvement in semantic structural coherence and texture details, thus providing a new deep learning method to ensure the smooth advancement of the subsequent interpretation of micro-resistivity imaging log images.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Temporal modulation as a resource: enhanced frequency estimation in continuous variable systems

arXiv:2606.15108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frequency estimation, a cornerstone of quantum metrology, has been significantly enhanced by advanced quantum sensing strategies. However, most protocols rely either on static or time-independent encoding mechanisms, inherently limiting their achievable precision scaling, or on control strategies requiring changing the Hamiltonian and/or implementing feedback mechanisms. To overcome this, we investigate a simpler dynamical encoding protocol where the quantum oscillator is driven by a general continuous temporal frequency modulation $\Omega(t) = \omega_0 f(t)$. We analytically demonstrate that for a given modulation profile $f(t)$ and its corresponding time-integral $F(t)$, the quantum Fisher information (QFI) scales as $\mathcal{O}(F(t)^2)$. This enhancement stems from the fact that temporal encoding fundamentally alters the mechanism of dynamical phase accumulation. Crucially, when evaluated under the energy and evolution-time constraints, this framework reveals a genuine precision enhancement over the conventional time-independent baseline. By analyzing explicit polynomial and exponential modulations, we establish that arbitrary precision scaling can be deterministically engineered, with ultimate bounds that are asymptotically saturable via optimal homodyne detection. Our framework provides a universal paradigm for exploiting time-dependent quantum control in next-generation sensors.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Finite Resources False Discovery Rate Control in Structured Hypothesis Spaces

arXiv:2606.15393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific discovery relies on large-scale hypothesis testing. However, the capacity to identify true discoveries while controlling false discovery faces major challenges: obtaining relevant reference data (the null distribution) is resource-intensive, leaving finite-data uncertainty, and the procedure should account for the inherent structure in the hypothesis space, when such structure exists. Here, we present a framework for controlling the false discovery rate both when each hypothesis is evidenced only by a finite count of null draws, leaving its p-value uncertain, and when the hypothesis space carries arbitrary structure, requiring only that the structure be represented through a suitable reproducing kernel. We present two decision rules that are both robust to structural mis-specification, yet offer a distinct trade-off between exact FDR control and statistical power. The first rule guarantees exact FDR control; the second maximizes power by adapting mirror-statistic control into count space, utilizing an analytical framework to assess FDR control when exact mirror symmetry is relaxed. Furthermore, the tractability gained by the RKHS framework allows us to directly investigate finite-data uncertainties, which we leverage to suggest a policy for the efficient allocation of null distribution samples.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

OneFocus: Enabling Real-World X-ray Security Screening with a Unified Vision-Language Model

X-ray contraband detection is critical for security in large-scale logistics and transportation, yet conventional detectors struggle to adapt to emerging contraband types and lack fundamental visual understanding. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer strong generalization but are hindered by the scarcity of high-quality X-ray image-caption data. To bridge this critical gap, we present MMXray, a meticulously curated benchmark of 52,124 image-caption pairs spanning 28 fine-grained classes of X-ray contraband. To enrich MMXray with realistic occlusion patterns, we further introduce CleanDET, a dedicated synthesis dataset containing clean foreground contraband images from 28 categories and background images with diverse density levels, together with AnyContraSyn, a controllable synthesis method designed to operate on CleanDET. We also develop OnePipe, an extensible pipeline for systematic data curation. Built on MMXray, we propose OneFocus, a unified VLM that supports four core tasks: visual question answering, contraband localization, classification, and image understanding. OneFocus achieves state-of-the-art performance in X-ray contraband understanding and demonstrates robust cross-domain generalization, establishing a strong vision-language baseline for security screening.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Simulation of Spin-Dependent Electron Transfer in a Synthetic Chiral Lattice with a Trapped Ion

arXiv:2606.13930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electron transfer through chiral structures can exhibit spin asymmetry, known as the chiral-induced spin selectivity effect, whose microscopic origin remains an open question. While path-interference within the chiral moiety has been proposed as a key mechanism, its experimental validation requires precise and versatile tunability of system parameters. Here we implement a programmable quantum simulation of spin-dependent electron transfer in a donor–chiral-bridge–acceptor model using a trapped ion. The bridge is encoded in internal states of the ion with tunable nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor couplings, while donor and acceptor states are coupled via a spectator bosonic motional mode. We observe spin-dependent interference within the bridge, and further reveal spin-dependence in donor-to-acceptor transfer dynamics, controlled by amplitude and phase of the coupling parameter. Our results identify interference among spin-dependent pathways as a microscopic origin of spin-dependent transfer, and open a route toward quantum simulations of complex chiral lattices with multi-level and bosonic degrees of freedom.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

SURGELLM: Rethinking Multi-Task Evaluation through Task-Aware Feature Gating with Class-Balanced Normalization

Fine-tuned encoders deployed across heterogeneous NLP tasks face three compounding problems: mismatched inductive biases, class-imbalance corruption of feature statistics, and no mechanism to condition attention on external lexical knowledge. We introduce \surgellm, a unified transformer framework that addresses each with a dedicated lightweight module: a surgical feature gate (learned per-dimension sigmoid over curated lexical indicators and \texttt{[CLS]}; provably degenerates to identity when features are uninformative), task-conditioned prefix tokens (quantized feature values and task identity prepended to every input), and Instance-Weighted Normalization (IWN; removes class-prior bias from gate statistics). We prove an excess-risk bound linking gate benefit to surgical feature alignment. Across four tasks, SST-2, multi-hop retrieval, LLM-prompt attribution, and authorship detection, covering 17,830 examples and eleven model variants over three seeds, the IWN variant achieves macro-F1 0.940 ($+0.036$ over the strongest non-IWN baseline; $+0.130$ on authorship detection). A random-vocabulary control ($-0.028$ avg.\ F1) confirms gains are lexical, not parametric. Code, vocabularies, and a $99.5\%$-recovery auto-extraction recipe are released.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Counting Trees from Satellite Imagery with Noisy Supervision

Counting individual trees is a fundamental task for environmental monitoring, yet remains largely unexplored with satellite imagery. At these resolutions, isolated trees may still be identifiable, but crown boundaries become ambiguous in dense forests, making the notion of an individual tree inherently ill-defined. Moreover, large-scale manual annotations of individual trees are prohibitively expensive. While scalable supervision can be derived from airborne LiDAR, the resulting annotations are noisy and difficult to exploit effectively. We address these challenges by formulating tree counting as a spatial density matching problem supervised through Unbalanced Optimal Transport. This formulation naturally accommodates both precise localization of isolate trees and robust density estimation in dense forests. We further introduce a self-correction mechanism that leverages transport residuals to progressively refine noisy supervision during training. We evaluate our approach on TinyTrees, a new benchmark spanning three continents and three satellite sensors, comprising over 215 million tree annotations (including 773K manually verified instances) across 23,000 sq.km. Our method consistently outperforms detection-based, regression-based, and transport-based distribution-matching baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of unbalanced transport and reliability-aware supervision for large-scale tree counting from satellite imagery. Code, data and models are available at https://github.com/dgominski/treematch.

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

SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-end In-Context Conditioning

Controlled character animation requires transferring motion from a driving sequence to a reference character. Prior works heavily rely on intermediate representations, including pose skeletons to represent motion or masked background to represent environment, which inevitably leads to information loss. To address this, we present SCAIL-2, a framework that bypasses those intermediates and achieves end-to-end character animation. By directly concatenating driving videos to the sequence, the model can obtain all the required visual information from the input video. To address the lack of end-to-end data, we unify sub-tasks of character animation with decoupled conditions and then curate a pipeline to synthesize MotionPair-60K, an end-to-end motion transfer dataset containing heterogeneous tasks of character animation. To achieve the unification, we utilize in-context mask conditioning and mode-specific RoPE as soft guidance beyond textual instructions and raw visual information. To address synthetic discrepancy in detailed regions, we propose Bias-Aware DPO to construct preference items to mitigate the errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in various character animation tasks. A large subset of synthetic data as well as model weights will be released at our project page: https://teal024.github.io/SCAIL-2/.

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

The Road to Artificial SuperIntelligence: A Comprehensive Survey of Superalignment

arXiv:2412.16468v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked discussion on Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical AI system that surpasses human intelligence. Although ASI remains hypothetical and far beyond current AI capabilities, discussing its potential and exploring its feasibility and potential risks is critical for the development of future AI systems. The idea of superalignment originates from scalable oversight, which studies how to supervise increasingly capable AI systems when direct human supervision becomes insufficient. In this paper, we focus on the superalignment problem: "The process of supervising, controlling, and governing artificial superintelligence." We first review scalable oversight paradigms-Sandwiching, Self-Enhancement, and Weak-to-Strong Generalization – then analyze the limitations of current paradigms through the lens of possibility and impossibility, discuss key challenges, and propose pathways for the safe and continual improvement of future AI systems.

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

ARMOR-MAD: Adaptive Routing for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Debate in Large Language Model Reasoning

arXiv:2606.13197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent debate (MAD) can improve large language model reasoning, but fixed debate pipelines often waste computation and can amplify correlated errors among similar agents. We propose ARMOR-MAD, a training-free heterogeneous MAD framework that treats debate as conditional computation. ARMOR-MAD combines three components: Pre-debate Agreement Routing (PAR) decides whether independently generated Round-0 answers require debate; Early Agreement Stopping Evaluator (EASE) stops debate after convergence; and Semantic Outlier Detection (SOD) down-weights abnormal final answers during aggregation. Across MATH Level 5, GSM8K, MMLU, and MMLU-Pro, ARMOR-MAD consistently improves over fixed-round heterogeneous debate with the same model pool, reaching 65.5\%, 96.5\%, 90.0\%, and 81.5\% accuracy, respectively. The results suggest that genuine model heterogeneity and agreement-based control are both important for making MAD more accurate and efficient.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Non-Medical COVID-19 Impacts and Hearing Status: A Global Study of Differential Health Impact Among Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing Populations

Background: Deaf and hard of hearing (HoH) experienced complex challenges during the COVID19 pandemic, including obscured visual communication from mask mandates, inaccessible public health messaging, and inadequate interpreter availability. We examined whether hearing status predicted nonmedical COVID19 impact on a global level. Methods: We conducted a nested cross-sectional analysis within a global study collecting data across two waves (April to May 2020 and July to August 2022) from 184 countries. Participants (N=7,998) were categorized as Deaf (n=304), Hard of Hearing (HoH; n=951), or Hearing (n=6,743). The primary outcome was a composite COVID-related non-medical Personal Impact TScore derived from 14 items across employment, resource access, and healthcare domains. Multinomial logistic regression models progressively adjusted for demographic, structural, and psychosocial variables. Results: Deaf participants reported substantially higher rates of pandemic-related job loss (28.9% vs. 9.6% hearing), healthcare cancellations (39.9% vs. 24.6%), and inability to obtain basic supplies. Over half (55.9%) of Deaf participants scored above the median composite impact index, compared to 39.2% of hearing participants. In the fully adjusted model, Deaf status remained an independent predictor of high non-medical impact (aOR=1.6, 95% CI: 1.1 to 2.4). HoH status showed no statistically significant difference from hearing participants in any model. Conclusions: People identifying as Deaf experienced significant disparities during COVID19 when compared with HoH or hearing people, driven by language access barriers and institutional exclusion rather than hearing loss per se. These experiences underscore the importance for systemic interventions centering on accessible communication, Deaf-centered needs, and reducing audism in Deaf-hearing interaction.

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

TAROT: Task-Adaptive Refinement of LLM-prior Graphs for Few-shot Tabular Learning

arXiv:2606.11640v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-shot tabular learning provides a cost-effective approach for real-world applications where annotation is costly and collecting sufficient samples for new tasks is difficult. Existing Traditional and LLM-based methods have demonstrated effectiveness in few-shot scenarios. However, traditional methods need additional training on unlabeled or generated data, which incur significant computational overhead. In addition, LLM-based methods that directly feed raw tabular data into LLMs raise privacy and compliance concerns. More importantly, both paradigms largely overlook the semantic relationships between features, which provide structural and semantic prior for constructing a semantic graph. Semantic graph is essential for modeling meaningful feature interactions in few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we propose TAROT, a GNN-based framework that encodes the structural and semantic prior by constructing and refining a task-adaptive semantic graph from this prior, thereby improving predictive performance in few-shot tabular learning. TAROT first encodes heterogeneous tabular data into unified node semantic representations via a Unified Semantic Tabular Node Encoder (USTNE). Then, it prompts LLMs to infer the semantic relationship between features based on the task description and feature names to construct a semantic graph. To mitigate structural noise introduced by the hallucination of LLMs, TAROT introduces Task-adaptive Semantic Graph Refinement that prunes spurious or task-unrelated edges and adds missing task-related ones, aligning the graph structure with the downstream objective. Finally, a GNN performs message passing over the refined graph to capture task-related semantic dependencies for prediction. Extensive experiments on various few-shot tabular learning benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of TAROT, establishing it as a state-of-the-art approach in this domain.

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

DICE: Diffusion Large Language Models Excel at Generating CUDA Kernels

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, owing to their capacity for parallel token generation. This paradigm is particularly well-suited for code generation, where holistic structural planning and non-sequential refinement are critical. Despite this potential, tailoring dLLMs for CUDA kernel generation remains challenging, obstructed not only by the high specialization but also by the severe lack of high-quality training data. To address these challenges, we construct CuKe, an augmented supervised fine-tuning dataset optimized for high-performance CUDA kernels. On top of it, we propose a bi-phase curated reinforcement learning (BiC-RL) framework consisting of a CUDA kernel infilling stage and an end-to-end CUDA kernel generation stage. Leveraging this training framework, we introduce DICE, a series of diffusion large language models designed for CUDA kernel generation, spanning three parameter scales, 1.7B, 4B, and 8B. Extensive experiments on KernelBench demonstrate that DICE significantly outperforms both autoregressive and diffusion LLMs of comparable scale, establishing a new state-of-the-art for CUDA kernel generation.

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

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

arXiv:2602.23116v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the problem of regularized best-response max-regret minimization in online RLHF under general preferences and bandit feedback. While various regularizers are utilized to robustify alignment, known polylogarithmic regret guarantees remain heavily specific to KL. To investigate whether such fast rates extend beyond KL, we adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) – capturing intransitive preferences over $d$-dimensional item-wise features via a rank-$2r$ skew-symmetric matrix – to isolate the impact of generic regularization. Crucially, under GBPM, we prove that the dual gap of any greedy policy is bounded by the squared estimation error, derived using only strong convexity and skew-symmetry. Under a feature coverage assumption, we establish a generic polylogarithmic regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\eta d^4 C_{\min}^{-1} (\log T)^2 \wedge d^2 C_{\min}^{-1/2} \sqrt{T})$ with Greedy Sampling, and a dimension-wise improved regret (for well-conditioned arm-sets) of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\min}^{-2} \sqrt{\eta r T} \wedge r^{1/3} C_{\min}^{-4/3} T^{2/3})$ with Explore-Then-Commit, where $\eta^{-1}$ is the regularization coefficient, $T$ is the time horizon, and $C_{\min}$ is an arm-set dependent quantity. This demonstrates that ``fast'' regrets are not KL-specific, but rather a fundamental consequence of generic strongly convex geometry.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Controlled Comparison of Machine Learning Models for Fault Classification and Localization in Power System Protection

arXiv:2510.00831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasing complexity of modern power systems, driven by the integration of inverter-based and distributed energy resources, challenges the reliability of conventional protection schemes and motivates the use of machine learning for protection tasks. However, published results are often difficult to compare because datasets, sensing assumptions, and decision horizons vary across studies. This paper presents a controlled comparison of machine learning models for fault classification (FC) and fault localization (FL) under identical sensing, timing, and validation conditions on a common electromagnetic transient dataset, using decision windows of 10-50 ms to reflect protection-relevant time scales. For FC, the best-performing nonlinear models achieve F1 scores above 0.98 already at 10 ms, while lower-capacity models degrade at shorter horizons but improve with longer windows, indicating that relevant fault-type information is already present in the earliest transient. For FL, the top-performing models reach a stable localization error of about 10 % of normalized line length across all evaluated horizons, while weaker models form a clearly separated second performance tier. Line-resolved analysis shows that localization accuracy varies across grid segments, indicating topology-dependent difficulty rather than insufficient temporal context alone. These findings provide a controlled reference for comparing machine learning models across two protection tasks with fundamentally different information requirements.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Genetic and Shared Environmental Influences on Cancer Risk and Cross-Cancer Associations in Nordic Twins

The relative contributions of genetic and shared environmental influences to cancer risk and cross-cancer associations remain poorly understood. We analyzed data from 222,530 same-sex twins from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the Nordic Twin Study of Cancer, including 43,060 incident cancers over a median follow-up of 41.6 years. Using a target trial framework, biometric modeling, and competing-risk adjustment, we estimated familial risk, heritability, and shared environmental contributions across 35 cancer sites. Lifetime cancer risk was 36.5%, increasing to 51.4% in monozygotic (MZ) twins and 45.3% in dizygotic (DZ) twins with an affected co-twin. Overall cancer risk was explained by heritable (28%) and shared environmental (40%) influences. Heritability was highest for prostate (42%), non-melanoma skin (24%), and breast (18%) cancers. Cross-cancer analyses revealed extensive overlap in the genetic and shared environmental factors across sites, consistent with widespread pleiotropy and shared environmental susceptibility. Prostate cancer exhibited the strongest genetic overlap with rectum/anus (12%) and kidney (11%) cancers, whereas co-shared environmental influences were most pronounced for breast-lung (11%), prostate-bladder (11%), and prostate-lung (12%) cancers. These findings show pervasive genetic overlap across cancers at different sites and emphasize the importance of incorporating familial shared environmental exposures into cancer risk prediction and prevention strategies.

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

EFIQA: Explainable Fundus Image Quality Assessment via Anatomical Priors

arXiv:2606.20108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image quality control is vital for a wide range of downstream applications. Deep learning-based image quality assessment methods typically train classifiers on dataset-specific quality labels, inheriting two limitations: (1) generalization is tied to the labeling criteria of the training set and (2) these methods cannot provide spatial feedback on where the quality is degraded, lacking explainability. In this work, we propose EFIQA, a framework that requires no quality-related supervision and produces spatial quality maps by design. Rather than learning ``what is degradation" from human-annotated labels, EFIQA learns ``what should be there" by leveraging anatomical priors. For fundus photography, we instantiate this as a two-stage approach, by first training an unsupervised anomaly detector via masked anatomical inpainting to identify regions of missing vasculature, and then distilling this prior knowledge into a shallow adapter mapping features of a frozen foundation model to precise quality maps. External-dataset evaluation demonstrates that this label-free approach with minimal adaptation achieves better performance and explainability compared with supervised methods across benchmarks with different quality criteria, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EmoFSM: A Finite State Machine for Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate people's emotional distress through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in ESC, most of these studies may not define the diagram from a state-model perspective, thereby providing a suboptimal solution for long-term satisfaction. To address such an issue, we leverage the Finite State Machine (FSM) on LLMs, and propose a framework called EmoFSM. Our framework allows a single LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, and self-reason the seeker's emotion, support strategy, and the final response upon each conversation turn. Substantial experiments in ESC datasets suggest that EmoFSM outperforms many baselines, including direct inference, self-fine, chain of thought, finetuning, and externally supported methods, even those with many more parameters.