中 EN
Sign In Register

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.

Sign In Register
01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Differential Determinants of Past Behavior and Future Intention Regarding Voluntary Blood Donation: A Cross-Sectional Study of Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices in Qingdao, China

Authors:
cheng↗zhang↗Wang↗Dai↗

Background A persistent gap between motivation and action threatens voluntary blood supply. This study examined the publics knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) regarding blood donation, with a particular focus on identifying the different determinants of past blood donation behavior and future willingness to donate. Methods Convenience sampling was used to conduct a cross-sectional survey among 1,058 eligible people in Qingdao, China, between July and November 2025. Data were collected via a self-designed KAP questionnaire. To find independent characteristics linked to previous behavior and future intention, respectively, multivariable binary logistic regression was used. Results Overall, 37.0% of participants (n=391) had a lifetime donation history, while 39.2% (n=415) intended to donate in the next 12 months. Past behavior was positively associated with older age (36-45 years: OR=6.84; 95% CI: 3.21-14.58), higher education (OR=2.06; 95% CI: 1.33-3.17), and interpersonal interaction channels (OR=1.45; 95% CI: 1.01-2.09) but hindered by safety concerns (OR=0.23; 95% CI: 0.16-0.34). Conversely, future intention was positively correlated with male sex (OR=1.69; 95% CI: 1.24-2.29), prior donation history (OR=2.69; 95% CI: 1.87-3.86), having family members or friends in need of blood (OR=2.75; 95% CI: 1.96-3.85), and traditional media exposure (OR=3.33; 95% CI: 2.18-5.10). Higher education was adversely correlated with future intention (OR=0.55; 95% CI: 0.38-0.79). Conclusion There is a substantial disparity between donation motivation and action. The determinants of past behavior and future intention are asymmetric, suggesting that stage-specific interventions are required, using social mobilization for initiating first-time donations, while employing family reciprocity and authoritative communication to sustain long-term engagement.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Cost-effectiveness of measles rapid diagnostic tests for replacing or expanding laboratory testing in Ethiopia

Authors:
McAndrew↗Khant↗Delport↗Abeysuriya↗R. G↗Alayu↗Fowkes↗F. J. I. J↗Gavioli↗Kehali↗K. Y↗Mekoro↗…

Background: In low- and middle-income countries, laboratory testing to rapidly detect measles outbreaks is limited by infrastructure availability and high costs. This study estimates the potential impact and cost-effectiveness of measles rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) if implemented nationally in Ethiopia to either replace or expand current testing. Methods: An agent-based model to simulate measles outbreaks was calibrated to Ethiopian measles surveillance data. Modelled outbreak outcomes were aggregated over a 10-year period. Scenarios included using RDTs to (1) replace laboratory testing; (2) replace epidemiological linkage; and (3) increase case detection, in addition to replacing laboratory testing and epidemiological linkage. Testing and outbreak response costs (in 2025 US$) were obtained from Ethiopian Public Health Institute from a government perspective. Total costs and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for each scenario were compared to baseline. Results: All scenarios were cost saving compared to baseline. Replacing laboratory testing with RDTs saved US$4.2M (3.2M-4.9M) over 10-years, but due to very low testing rates the benefits of eliminating laboratory testing delays were offset by missed cases from the lower RDT sensitivity, leading to similar outbreak detection times and DALYs. Replacing epidemiological linkage with RDTs had similar DALYs but increased the cost savings to US$9.7M. Using RDTs to double case detection reduced outbreak detection time from 113 to 80 days, averted 17,000 DALYs, and saved US$4.3M. Conclusions: In Ethiopia, use of measles RDTs could be cost saving, and if used to expand testing could prevent measles infections through faster outbreak detection and response.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MatchLM2Lite: A Scalable MLLM-to-Lite Framework for Reproduced Content Identification

Authors:
Xiaotian Fan↗Hiok Hian Ong↗David Yuchen Wang↗Zirui Zhu↗Kanchan Sarkar↗Kun Xu↗

Content moderation is critical for online video platforms to ensure content safety, protect creators, and sustain positive user experiences. Beyond filtering harmful content, platforms must guarantee content authenticity at scale so that users are exposed to diverse, original videos rather than low-value reproductions. We present MatchLM2Lite, a real-time, production-grade reproduced content identification (RCI) system that leverages the powerful understanding of a multimodal large language model (MLLM) distilled into a small and fast-inference model. Our system jointly models video, audio, and text signals, operating on pairs of videos to produce fine-grained reproduction scores. The system comprises two modules, MatchLM and MatchLite, and a two-stage training recipe. First, our high-capacity MLLM, MatchLM, serves as a teacher model to define the upper bound of RCI performance. Its capabilities are then distilled into a compact student model, MatchLite. This design allows MatchLite to deliver low-latency, high-throughput inference on video pairs while preserving much of MatchLM's accuracy, making it suitable for integration into real-time recommendation systems. MatchLM achieves an F1-score improvement of +8.57 compared to our previous production model. After knowledge distillation, MatchLite retains a +6.55 gain in F1-score while reducing computational cost by 35x. Deployed at scale, MatchLM2Lite enables efficient, pairwise multimodal RCI, stably serving online traffic at high queries per second (QPS) with an end-to-end latency below 30 seconds. This system has reduced the reproduced video view rate on our platform by 2.5% without degrading user engagement, demonstrating its effectiveness in a large-scale production environment.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

A Unifying Lens on Reward Uncertainty in RLHF

Authors:
Ely Hahami↗Yoel Zimmermann↗Ray Zhou↗Jack Benarroch Jedlicki↗

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is bottlenecked by reward hacking, where the policy exploits errors in a proxy reward model (RM) and produces high RM scores without genuine quality gains. A natural mitigation is pessimism: lowering rewards in regions where the RM is uncertain. However, standard scalar RMs provide no principled notion of uncertainty. We argue that the right object is a distributional reward model $p(r\mid x,y)$. Under either a Bayesian inference or a KL-distributionally robust optimization (KL-DRO) lens, the KL-regularized RLHF objective admits a closed-form effective reward $\tilde r(x,y) = \pm\beta\log\mathbb{E}_p[e^{\pm r/\beta}]$. The pessimistic branch unifies the prior heuristics for RM ensemble aggregation: mean aggregation, worst-case optimization (WCO), and uncertainty-weighted optimization (UWO) all emerge as limits or truncations of this single expression. This also clarifies the implicit assumptions of each existing rule.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Higher-Order Token Interactions via Quantum Attention

Authors:
Jian Xu↗Chao Li↗Delu Zeng↗John Paisley↗Qibin Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.11673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard dot-product self-attention computes, in a single layer, only pairwise (order-2) interactions between tokens; representing a generic order-$k$ interaction is known to require either super-quadratic resources in one layer or composition across depth. We introduce Quantum Higher-Order Attention (QHA), a shallow, hardware-realizable quantum attention head that, via data re-uploading and an all-to-all non-Clifford entangler, synthesizes order-$k$ token interactions inside the circuit and exposes them through a local single-qubit read-out. We prove (i) an expressivity separation: any single standard self-attention layer with embedding dimension $m$, $H$ heads and $p$-bit precision satisfying $mHp=o(N/\log\log N)$ cannot represent the order-$k$ correlation family that one QHA head represents with circuit depth $O(\log k)$ ($O(k)$ two-qubit gates); and (ii) a trainability guarantee for its local-design instantiation: with a local read-out and $O(\log n)$ depth the gradient variance is $\Omega(1/\mathrm{poly}(n))$ (no barren plateau), which we confirm empirically – while being explicit that the more expressive all-to-all instantiation we benchmark is trained empirically and shows exponentially decaying gradients. Empirically, at a $6.5\times$ smaller parameter budget, QHA generalizes hidden-subset parity of every order $k\le6$ from disjoint inputs, whereas the larger classical attention head collapses past order~2; consistent with theory, the size of the advantage tracks the target's Fourier degree - largest for parity and shrinking when low-order structure is present. As an application, QHA serves as a compact high-order interaction detector across three domains - genetic epistasis, learning-parity-with-noise, and graph triangle detection - reaching the noise ceiling at the smallest parameter budget where field-standard linear methods fail.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-perturbative CPMG scaling and qutrit-driven breakdown under compiled superconducting-qubit control: a single-qubit study

Authors:
Jun Ye↗

arXiv:2603.29525v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decoherence in superconducting qubits arises from both multilevel dynamics and structured environmental noise, yet perturbative models cannot capture all resulting signatures. Here, EmuPlat couples instruction-set-architecture-level waveform generation to the hierarchical equations of motion HEOM under $1/f$ non-Markovian pure dephasing. In the resulting non-perturbative regime – where filter-function predictions become quantitatively uninformative – CPMG scaling of a three-level superconducting transmon yields one calibration result, two physical findings, and one structural null. Y-CPMG exhibits axis-dependent scaling-law breakdown – non-monotonic decoherence, partial coherence revival, and pronounced X–Y population asymmetry ($0.204$ vs ${

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Micro-macro population dynamics models of benthic algae with long-memory decay and generic growth

Authors:
Hidekazu Yoshioka↗Kunihiko Hamagami↗

arXiv:2505.04289v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benthic algae as a primary producer in riverine ecosystems develop biofilms on the riverbed. Their population dynamics involve growth and decay processes, the former owing to the balance between biological proliferation and mortality, while the latter to mechanical abrasion because of the transport of sediment particles. Contrary to the assumptions of previous studies, the decay has experimentally been found to exhibit long-memory behavior, where the population decreases at an algebraic rate. However, the origin and mathematical theory of this phenomenon remain unresolved. The objective of this study is to introduce a novel mathematical model employing spin processes to describe microscopic biofilm dynamics. A spin process is a continuous-time jump process transitioning between states 0 and 1, and the continuum limit of these processes captures the long-memory decay and generates generic growth. The proposed framework leverages heterogeneous spin rates, achieved by appropriately superposing spin processes with distinct rates, to reproduce the long-memory decay. Computational simulations demonstrate the behavior of the model, particularly emphasizing rate-induced tipping phenomena. This mathematical model provides a computationally tractable interpretation of benthic algae dynamics and their long-term prediction, relevant to river-engineering applications.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

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

Authors:
Michael L. Evans↗MD Fayaz Bin Hossen↗MD Shibly Sadique↗Walia Farzana↗Khan M. Iftekharuddin↗

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

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Visual-OPSD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Self-Distillation for Efficient Unified Multimodal Reasoning

Authors:
Pengyu Li↗Zhitao Gao↗Lingling Zhang↗Muye Huang↗Yuanming Li↗Fangzhi Xu↗Jun Liu↗

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) interleave generated ''visual thoughts'' (VTs) with text reasoning to improve spatial tasks. This incurs roughly an order-of-magnitude inference cost from multi-step diffusion. We find this cost yields limited direct benefit. On ThinkMorph, removing or noising VTs barely changes accuracy across nine benchmarks. Once rendered, attention concentrates on the VT regardless of content. Yet a KL diagnostic shows that conditioning on a privileged VT trace shifts the model's completion distribution. This suggests the generation pathway encodes useful reasoning beyond the rendered pixels. Motivated by this gap, we propose Visual On-Policy Self-Distillation(Visual-OPSD). Teacher and student share identical weights but differ in context: the teacher sees privileged VTs while the student sees only the question. Token-level JSD distillation on on-policy student trajectories transfers the teacher's reasoning to a text-only student. Across nine benchmarks, Visual-OPSD improves over its generative teacher by $+3.40$pp with $14.3\times$ speedup (10.0s vs. 142.8s per sample) and outperforms same-scale VLMs by $+63.83$pp on VSP. A Gaussian-noise control ($+0.40$pp vs. $+10.28$pp for real VTs) and $58.4\%$ closure of the KL gap confirm that gains come from the semantic content of the generation pathway.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Small LLMs: Pruning vs. Training from Scratch

Authors:
Yufeng Xu↗Taiming Lu↗Kunjun Li↗Jiachen Zhu↗Mingjie Sun↗Zhuang Liu↗

Pruning promises a shortcut to strong small language models. In this work, we examine this promise by pruning Llama-3.1-8B at pruning ratios of 0.5–0.8 with six methods spanning depth, width, and sparse granularities, under two controlled token-matched settings. (1) With the same training token budget, pruned initialization consistently outperforms random initialization. This shows that the parent model provides a strong starting point, although the advantage narrows as the training token budget grows and as the pruning ratio rises, nearly vanishing at the highest pruning ratio we study. (2) When training from scratch is instead given the full token budget consumed by the whole pipeline, pruning at finer granularities still retains an advantage, while coarser structured pruning can be matched or surpassed. This suggests that the parent model transfers knowledge that additional training tokens alone cannot fully recover, but only at fine granularity. Taken together, our results yield a clear recommendation: with a large pretrained model in hand and a limited training token budget, pruning is better than training from scratch; when the training budget is not limited, training from scratch can be competitive for coarser pruning, so a large pretrained parent is not always necessary.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

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

Authors:
Ted Fujimoto↗Jacob Benz↗

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.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SciOrch: Learning to Orchestrate Expert LLMs for Solving Frontier Multimodal Scientific Reasoning Tasks

Authors:
Jingru Guo↗Xiangyuan Xue↗Lian Zhang↗Wanghan Xu↗Siki Chen↗Philip Torr↗Wanli Ouyang↗Lei Bai↗Zhenfei Yin↗

Frontier scientific reasoning remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), where even the strongest commercial systems fall short of expert-level performance. A closer look at model behavior reveals substantial complementarity that single-model evaluation hides: different frontier models excel on different question types, and no single model captures the full picture. We present SciOrch, a framework that trains a lightweight 8B model to orchestrate frontier LLMs for scientific reasoning. The orchestrator decomposes each question, delegates sub-problems to selected commercial models through API calls, and synthesizes a final answer. Training such an orchestrator is fundamentally harder than conventional agentic RL: each action triggers an API call that is expensive in both dollar cost and latency, making standard online rollouts infeasible. We address this with MCTS-based approach, producing diverse orchestration trajectories, extracting per-node single-turn samples, and optimizing the orchestrator with GRPO-style training. On a 240-question test set spanning SGI-Reasoning and Scientists' First Exam, SciOrch reaches 56.66% average accuracy, outperforming the strongest single commercial model by 3.74% and the strongest multi-agent baseline by 3.33%. It also attains the best accuracy on both SGI and SFE with less than half the API cost of typical multi-agent methods.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Autonomous Event-Driven Multi-Agent Orchestration for Enterprise AI at Scale

Authors:
Harsh Rao Dhanyamraju↗Leonidas Raghav↗Aaron Lee↗

arXiv:2606.20058v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprise AI aims to move toward continuous event monitoring, detection, and action across specialist agents, yet existing multi-agent systems largely assume discrete request-response workflows and remain underexplored at enterprise scale. We evaluate DAG Plan and Execute and ReAct across 208 production-derived enterprise scenarios spanning Persona (

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Speaking in Self-Assessing Tongues: On the Verbalized Confidence of LLMs in Machine Translation

Authors:
Ali Marashian↗Alexis Palmer↗Katharina von der Wense↗

The rapid rise in popularity of large language models (LLMs) for translation calls for a thorough study of the reliability of their confidence in their own outputs. Unlike many generation tasks, translation errors and confidence levels can be useful at different levels of granularity (tokens, words, or spans). Unsupervised approaches based on internal signals like predicted probabilities can be misleading because they reflect certainty among alternatives rather than correctness. In addition, they require access to such internal signals. Here, we devise five verbalized methods of extracting an LLM's per-token confidence without those shortcomings and compare their reliability with that of the model's internal signals of certainty. We evaluate reliability using two forms of alignment: fine-grained error detection and calibration. For both, internal and verbalized methods perform similarly, although results vary by model. Interestingly, we find little to no correlation between internal and verbalized methods.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Haiku to Opus in Just 10 bits: LLMs Unlock Large Compression Gains

Authors:
Roy Rinberg↗Annabelle Michael Carrell↗Simon Henniger↗Nicholas Carlini↗Keri Warr↗

arXiv:2604.02343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the compression of LLM-generated text across lossless and lossy regimes, characterizing a compression-compute frontier where more compression is possible at the cost of more compute. For lossless compression, domain-adapted LoRA adapters can improve LLM-based arithmetic coding by 2x over compression with the base LLM alone. For lossy compression, prompting a model for a succinct rewrite then applying arithmetic coding can achieve compression ratios of approximately 0.03, a 2x improvement over compressing the original response. We further introduce Question-Asking compression (QA), an interactive lossy protocol inspired by the game 'Twenty Questions'. A small model iteratively refines its response by asking yes/no questions to a stronger model, transferring exactly one bit per answer. On 8 benchmarks spanning math, science, and code, 10 binary questions recover 23% to 72% of the capability gap between a small and large model on standard benchmarks and 7% to 38% on harder benchmarks, achieving compression ratios of 0.0006 to 0.004. This is over 100x smaller than prior LLM-based compression (Deletang et al., 2024), suggesting that interactive protocols can transfer knowledge far more efficiently than transmitting full responses.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

Authors:
Yantao Li↗Qiang Hui↗Chenyang Yan↗Kanzhi Cheng↗Fang Zhao↗Chao Tan↗Huanling Gao↗Jianbing Zhang↗Kai Wang↗Xinyu Dai↗Shiguo Lian↗

Reinforcement learning has recently improved the reasoning ability of Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs, yet prevailing reward designs emphasise final-answer correctness and consequently tolerate process hallucinations–cases where models reach the right answer while misperceiving visual evidence. We address this process-level misalignment with PaLMR, a framework that aligns not only outcomes but also the reasoning process itself. PaLMR comprises two complementary components: a perception-aligned data layer that constructs process-aware reasoning data with structured pseudo-ground-truths and verifiable visual facts, and a process-aligned optimisation layer that constructs a hierarchical reward fusion scheme with a process-aware scoring function to encourage visually faithful chains-of-thought and improve training stability. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that our approach substantially reduces reasoning hallucinations and improves visual reasoning fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art results on HallusionBench while maintaining strong performance on MMMU, MathVista, and MathVerse. These findings indicate that PaLMR offers a principled and practical route to process-aligned multimodal reasoning, advancing the reliability and interpretability of MLLMs.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

VitalAgent: A Tool-Augmented Agent for Reactive and Proactive Physiological Monitoring over Wearable Health Data

Authors:
Di Zhu↗Yu Yvonne Wu↗Hong Jia↗Aaqib Saeed↗Vassilis Kostakos↗Ting Dang↗

arXiv:2605.29483v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Wearable devices enable continuous monitoring of physiological signals such as ECG and PPG, but existing mHealth systems are largely limited to task-specific prediction pipelines or reactive question answering over static summaries. They lack the ability to support temporal reasoning, persistent physiological context, and proactive monitoring over long-term signal streams. We propose VitalAgent, a tool-augmented agentic framework for ECG/PPG-based mHealth that supports both reactive question answering and proactive monitoring. VitalAgent is built on a longitudinal physiological memory and a tool-augmented reasoning interface that enables dynamic computation over raw signals. We further introduce VitalBench, a longitudinal physiological monitoring benchmark dataset comprising 1,862 QA pairs for reactive question answering and 90.2 hours of continuous ECG/PPG recordings for proactive monitoring, covering cardiac, physical activity, and stress-related tasks. Experiments demonstrate that VitalAgent achieves over 25% improvement over prompt-based and ReAct baselines in reactive evaluation and supports proactive alert monitoring over long-term physiological signals, highlighting the importance of dynamic tool use and long-term physiological monitoring.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

CaVe-VLM-CoT: An Interpretable Vision-Language Model Framework

Authors:
Sneha Rao↗Shaina Raza↗Dhanesh Ramachandram↗

arXiv:2606.18385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain prone to hallucinations, producing fluent but visually unfaithful outputs. Existing chain-of-thought and retrieval-augmented methods only partially address this, as they neither enforce step-level citation grounding nor route verification failures back to retrieval for correction. We present CaVe-VLM-CoT, a modular reflection-based agentic-RAG framework that enforces evidence-grounded reasoning through a five-stage closed-loop pipeline: Extractor, Retriever, Solver, Citation Injector, and Verifier, in which detected ungrounded claims trigger structured feedback to the Extractor for targeted re-retrieval. Since no existing framework jointly measures retrieval quality, step-wise citation faithfulness, and cross-modal grounding, we propose a suite of 23 component-wise metrics across all stages, anchored by CaVeScore, a composite metric weighting accuracy, citation precision and recall, attribution, and evidence grounding. Without any architectural or prompt modifications, CaVe-VLM-CoT achieves 87.1\% accuracy and 56.6\% CaVeScore on ScienceQA , and 55.2\% accuracy and 35.7\% CaVeScore on MMMU (30 subjects).

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Boltzmann-Like Occupation of Nonequilibrium Steady States on Dense Networks

Authors:
Jacob Calvert↗

arXiv:2606.14542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central problem in statistical physics is to extend the Boltzmann distribution to nonequilibrium steady states (NESS). We prove that NESS on large dense networks have Boltzmann-like occupation despite extensive entropy production. We further show that the active-matter heuristic of "low rattling" is asymptotically exact. Intuitively, these NESS spend a greater fraction of their time in states they leave more slowly. This explanation extends to the broader class of "equiaccessible" steady states, which play a role in our analysis akin to that of equilibrium in linear response.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

HoloRec: Holistic Encoding and Interleaved Reasoning for Generative Recommendation

Authors:
Shuqi Zhao↗Jingsong Su↗Xiang Liu↗Xingzhi Yao↗Yiming Qiu↗Huimu Wang↗Liang Lin↗Pengbo Mo↗Mingming Li↗Jiao Dai↗Jizhong Han↗Songlin Hu↗…

arXiv:2606.15331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation models that formulate the task as sequence generation overcome the objective fragmentation problem of traditional cascade architectures, yet existing approaches still suffer from flat semantic representations lacking hierarchical structure for multi-step reasoning and an externally constructed chain-of-thought (CoT) that requires expensive annotations and remains disconnected from the generation objective. We propose HoloRec, an endogenous chain-of-thought recommendation mechanism that unifies representation, reasoning, and generation by constructing a hierarchical semantic encoding matrix via multi-granularity nested residual quantization optimized by a holistic reconstruction loss. HoloRec supports two inference modes: a non-thinking mode that uses lightweight multi-granularity supervised alignment for fast prediction, and a thinking mode that employs an interleaved reasoning scheme to generate CoT steps on the fly, directly embedding reasoning into the generation process without external data. Experiments on multiple public recommendation datasets demonstrate that HoloRec consistently outperforms baselines, with especially significant gains in sparse scenarios, and the thinking mode achieves better accuracy than the non-thinking mode with only modest inference overhead.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Physics in 2-Steps: Locking Motion Priors Before Visual Refinement Erases Them

Authors:
Woojung Han↗Seil Kang↗Youngjun Jun↗Min-Hung Chen↗Fu-En Yang↗Seong Jae Hwang↗

Image-to-Video diffusion models leverage input images to generate visually stunning content, yet frequently produce motion that violates physical laws. We reveal a surprising finding: a 2-step generation often exhibits better physical consistency than a 50-step output from the same model. Through spectral analysis, we trace this to phase erosion during denoising; the phase degrades significantly (dropping by $\approx 18\%$ from step 2 to step 50), whereas the magnitude remains relatively stable. Building on this insight, we propose PhaseLock, a training-free framework that preserves the valid motion priors from few-step inference throughout the denoising trajectory. Rather than relying on full-step inference for physical consistency, PhaseLock extracts a motion prior from just 2 steps and enforces it onto high-fidelity generation via Latent Delta Guidance. Our approach effectively mitigates phase degradation, improving physical consistency by an average of 6.2 points across diverse models while largely maintaining visual fidelity, with negligible overhead ($1.06\times$ time, $1.02\times$ memory) and reduced reliance on expensive external guidance methods ($\sim5\times$ time). Project Page: https://dnwjddl.github.io/phaselock

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

The Vision Encoder as a Privacy Boundary: Visual-Token Side Channels in Encoder-Free Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Chenyu Zhou↗Qiliang Jiang↗Shuning Wu↗Xu Zhou↗

A vision encoder compresses image pixels into semantic embeddings, implicitly acting as a privacy boundary by preserving semantic content while attenuating pixel-local detail required for exact text recovery. Encoder-free vision-language models (VLMs) remove this boundary by routing image patches directly into the language-model token stream, thereby exposing an architectural privacy attack surface: intermediate visual tokens become a pre-output side channel. Under a token-access adversary, decoders invert visual-token streams from two encoder-free VLMs, Gemma4 and Fuyu, recovering recognizable image structure and readable held-out access codes, whereas matched encoder-based controls localize target regions but recover no exact strings. Within-model ablations show that the operative factor is spatial sampling fidelity of the visual-token grid, especially character-direction sampling density, rather than token or value count. The leakage is not limited to exported tokens: Gemma4 layer-0 key-value cache tensors are directly invertible, placing the side channel within KV caches commonly persisted by production serving stacks for decoding efficiency. The attack survives clutter, realistic document degradation, and zero-shot transfer to public document images, and it resists value-level defenses such as additive noise and quantization. Effective mitigation must therefore reduce spatial sampling, making removal of the vision encoder a first-class privacy decision in VLM deployment.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

The Hidden Environmental Cost of Poor Coding Practices in TensorFlow and Keras Applications: A Study on Resource Leaks and Carbon Emissions

Authors:
Bashar Abdallah↗Gustavo Santos↗Rola Al Bataineh↗Alain Abran↗Mohammad Hamdaqa↗

arXiv:2606.19799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiency and sustainability are critical considerations in the development and deployment of machine learning (ML) applications. Among the factors influencing sustainability, resource leaks in ML code can introduce hidden inefficiencies that elevate energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Despite this, empirical evidence quantifying their environmental impact remains limited. This emerging results paper presents an initial empirical investigation of two common resource-leak smells, namely Improper Model Reuse (IMR) and Unreleased Tensor References (UTR), and their impact on energy consumption and CO2 emissions in TensorFlow and Keras workloads. Controlled experiments were conducted for each smell by executing identical training tasks while comparing against a smell-free baseline. Our preliminary results show that both smells consistently increase estimated electricity usage and carbon emissions. IMR and UTR increased electricity consumption by approximately 32% and 46%, respectively, with proportional increases in CO2 emissions. Paired statistical tests indicate that these differences are systematic and statistically significant, providing initial empirical evidence that resource-leak smells may degrade ML energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. These findings suggest that resource-leak smells pose measurable risks to both software quality and sustainability, emphasizing the importance of integrating resource-lifecycle management and energy-efficiency considerations into ML development.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AFFORDABILITY OF INTOXICATION FROM CHEAP ETHANOL: EVIDENCE FROM RETAIL ALCOHOL MARKETS IN UGANDA

Authors:
Muhamudu↗Niwagaba↗Rwakahangi↗S. P↗Kwagala↗Miller↗T. R↗Zyambo↗Rizzo↗Achoki↗

Background: Alcohol affordability is a determinant of consumption and alcohol-related harm. In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), informal production, variable alcohol strength, and non-standard packaging complicate conventional affordability measures, limiting evidence on the economic accessibility of alcohol and the cost of intoxication. Objective: To assess the affordability of intoxication in Uganda by estimating the cost of obtaining ethanol to reach intoxication across alcohol products, packaging types, and retail contexts. Methods: Data were collected on 824 alcoholic beverages from urban, rural, and urban-slum retail markets. Ethanol-standardized pricing (price per gram of alcohol) was calculated, and the cost of consuming 60 g of ethanol was estimated. Multivariate regression identified determinants of ethanol affordability. Results: Affordability varied by product type and packaging. Opaque beers and illicit spirits provided the cheapest pathways to intoxication, with median costs of UGX 1,200-1,500 per 60 g of ethanol. Plastic packaging was associated with lower ethanol costs than glass packaging. Ethanol prices differed across formal and informal markets (p < 0.01), while rural areas and urban informal settlements had 20-25% lower costs than urban areas. Regulatory status alone did not predict affordability. Conclusions: In Ugandas diverse alcohol market, affordability is driven by access to ethanol rather than beverage price alone. Low-cost, high-strength alcohol sold through informal channels enables intoxication at minimal expense, among disadvantaged populations. Implications: Alcohol policies should target ethanol content through minimum unit pricing, alcohol-content-based taxation, and regulation of informal markets and packaging practices to reduce harmful consumption and inequities.

Read & Discuss → View Source →