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) 2026-06-12

DeepJEB++: Foundation Model-Driven Large-Scale 3D Engineering Dataset via 2D Latent Space Augmentation

arXiv:2606.12994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-driven engineering design is constrained by the lack of large-scale 3D datasets that pair geometry with physics-based performance labels. In particular, existing 3D data augmentation techniques have limitations in preserving subtle and diverse geometric variations, and it remains difficult to automate the subsequent simulation-labeling process, where boundary conditions vary depending on the generated geometry. We present DeepJEB++, a foundation-model-driven data-augmentation framework that expands a small seed set of jet engine brackets into a large, simulation-labeled 3D dataset under constrained resources. Our key idea is to augment in the data-rich 2D latent space, then transfer to 3D. In Stage 1, we fine-tune a pretrained 2D latent diffusion model on multi-view renders and synthesize novel views by latent interpolation, retaining manufacturable designs through a vision-language-model (VLM) quality filter. In Stage 2, the validated images are lifted to 3D meshes by a domain-adapted generative foundation model. In Stage 3, an automated pipeline recognizes the load and bolt interfaces on each mesh and assigns finite-element labels – mass, stress, and displacement – without manual intervention. We assess augmentation quality along three intrinsic axes: manufacturability, label fidelity against the SimJEB ground truth, and distributional consistency. Starting from fewer than 400 seed designs, DeepJEB++ yields 15,360 simulation-labeled 3D brackets – a 40x expansion – using a single GPU per stage. The dataset will be made publicly available to support reproducible engineering-AI research.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Upper tails for irregular graphs beyond the mean-field regime

arXiv:2606.14564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $G_{n,p}$ be the binomial random graph of density $p$ and let $X_H$ be the number of copies of a fixed graph $H$ in $G_{n,p}$. We prove asymptotically tight bounds on the logarithmic upper-tail probability of $X_H$ whenever $H$ is a connected, irregular graph with maximum degree $\Delta \ge 2$ and $p \ge n^{-1/\Delta - \varepsilon_H} (\log n)^{\omega(1)}$ for an explicit $\varepsilon_H >0$. These bounds are expressed in terms of a new variational problem that generalises the combinatorial optimisation problem arising from the naïve mean-field approximation. This new variational problem includes an entropy term that corresponds to the large number of embeddings of certain highly structured graphs in $K_n$. For a certain class of irregular graphs $H$ that we call stable, we show that this description of the upper-tail probability is valid in a range of densities that is optimal up to a poly($\log\log n$) factor. For a further subclass of stable graphs, which includes all irregular complete bipartite graphs, we show that this range of densities is optimal up to a multiplicative constant.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Martingale Solutions to a Stochastic Keller-Segel System with nonlocal Source and Super-linear Noise

arXiv:2606.11774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Global nonnegative martingale solutions are shown to exist for a stochastic Keller-Segel system with a nonlocal Fisher-KPP source and super-linear multiplicative noise. The result is obtained for nonnegative initial data with no smallness assumption, provided that the nonlocal source term is dominant. The main difficulty stems from the absence of a coercive structure and the super-linear nature of the noise. An additional cut-off with finite L^2 norm in the classical Galerkin method is added to establish a well-posed approximation problem. Moreover, due to the nonlocal Fisher-KPP structure, it is necessary to prove the positivity of the approximating solution in order to obtain uniform estimates. In the compactness arguments, the usual tightness argument in the framework of Hilbert spaces cannot be directly applied to the uniform estimates obtained in this paper. As a result, we develop a more general version of the compactness argument and tightness criterion, presented in the appendix, which will be applied throughout the paper. This allows for the global existence of nonnegative martingale solutions to be derived from Jakubowski's version of the Skorokhod Theorem, along with a thorough discussion of the convergence properties.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for Antibody Sequence-Structure Design

Antibodies specifically recognize antigens and play a central role in therapeutic discovery. Designing antibodies for a given antigen remains challenging because antigen-antibody complex data are limited, whereas the sequence and conformational spaces of complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) are large. Retrieved CDR templates from databases or candidate libraries can narrow the design space and improve controllability, but retrieval for novel antigens is often sparse and imperfect; treating retrieved templates as hard conditions can bias the denoising process and cause negative transfer. To address this problem, we propose Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for antibody sequence-structure design (NT-ABDiff), a joint diffusion framework that treats candidate CDR-only templates as optional and potentially unreliable conditions. NT-ABDiff uses reliability-aware template modulation to estimate the context-conditioned usefulness of each candidate and to adaptively reweight and fuse multiple templates during conditioning. We further train the model with mixed-quality and corrupted templates as conditional perturbation regularization, encouraging the denoiser to exploit informative templates while remaining stable when templates are uninformative. Experiments under controlled template shifts and a train-set retrieval evaluation show that NT-ABDiff improves CDR-H3 sequence recovery and structural accuracy over strong baselines, while retaining robustness to missing, mismatched, and corrupted templates. Under a stringent random-template CDR-H3 evaluation, NT-ABDiff improves amino-acid recovery (AAR) from 30.03% to 39.47% and reduces RMSD from 3.160 to 2.915A; with train-set retrieval candidates, it achieves 39.50% AAR and 2.76 {ring} A RMSD. Code, processed splits, {ring} configuration files, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/ShiDeng7rz/NT-ABDiff.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Evolving Agents in the Dark: Retrospective Harness Optimization via Self-Preference

AI agents rely on a harness of skills, tools, and workflows to solve complex problems. Continually improving this harness is essential for adapting to new tasks. However, existing optimization methods typically require ground-truth validation sets, yet such labeled data is difficult to acquire in practical deployment settings. To address this problem, we introduce Retrospective Harness Optimization (RHO), a self-supervised method that optimizes the agent harness using only past trajectories. Specifically, RHO selects a diverse coreset of challenging tasks from past trajectories and re-solves them in parallel. The agent analyzes these rollouts using self-validation and self-consistency, then generates candidate harness updates and selects the most effective one by its own pairwise self-preference. We evaluate RHO across three diverse domains, spanning software engineering, technical work, and knowledge work. Notably, a single optimization round improves the pass rate on SWE-Bench Pro from 59% to 78% without any external grading. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that RHO effectively targets prior failure modes. As a result, the optimized harness alters the agent's behavior patterns and sustains higher accuracy during long-horizon sessions.

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

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Selecting Samples on Graphs: A Unified Dataset Pruning Framework for Lossless Training Acceleration

The rapid growth of modern training datasets has significantly increased computational cost, motivating dataset pruning~(DP) methods which retain only a subset of informative samples to reduce training cost. Existing pruning criteria typically rely on either intrinsic signals that assess samples independently or extrinsic signals that promote diversity via pairwise relations. While effective in their own specific regimes, each captures only one aspect of sample utility and lacks robustness across different pruning ratios or data distribution. In this work, we present a unified graph-based DP framework. By modeling the dataset as a weighted graph, where node weights encode intrinsic value and edge weights encode extrinsic value, DP can be cast as a Maximum Weight Clique Problem (MWCP). Although MWCP is NP-hard, its structure admits a principled greedy solution based on sample-wise marginal gains. Under a few mild conditions, we further prove that this unified objective enjoys a formal approximation guarantee, which applies to a broad family of importance metrics and provides practical design guidelines. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing DP methods while substantially reducing training cost, reducing training time by over 40\% without sacrificing accuracy on ImageNet-1k with ResNet-50.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Incremental costs of transitioning from four to eight WHO-recommended antenatal care visits in Uganda: A costing analysis from a societal perspective

Background In 2016, the World Health Organization revised its antenatal care (ANC) recommendation from four to eight visits. For low- and middle-income countries like Uganda, where achieving even four visits remains a challenge, this transition has significant cost implications for both the health system and households. This study estimated the incremental costs of adopting the eight-visit model from a societal perspective. Methods The study was conducted in six government health facilities in southwestern Uganda. A micro-costing approach estimated health facility costs (personnel, equipment, consumables, and overhead). Costs incurred at patients end (transport, ultrasound, medical expenses, and time) were collected from 785 women using a questionnaire, with all costs in 2025 USD. Results For an average of 4.3 visits, total cost per woman was $100.1: facility costs $43.7 (43.7%), and patient costs $56.4 (56.3%). Transitioning to eight visits would increase total cost by $57.8 (57.8%), of which $36.4 (63.0%) would fall on households, equivalent to 68.8% of average monthly household income. Total costs would rise by 55.4% ($115.5 to $179.5) at Health Center IVs and 64.3% ($102.3 to $168.1) at Health Center IIIs, with facility costs up 43.4% and 62.9% and patient costs up 61.2% and 65.7%, respectively. Conclusion Transitioning to eight ANC visits would impose a large financial burden on households, with the incremental patient cost equivalent to more than two-thirds of average monthly household income. Equitable implementation requires improving availability of medicines and diagnostics, subsidizing transport, exploring telemedicine or community-based models, and improving efficiency at lower-tier health centers.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Emotional regulation improves deep learning-based image classification

arXiv:2606.13081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotion significantly influences cognition, enhancing memory and learning under certain conditions. Drawing on this principle, emotion-augmented deep learning investigates how affective states can improve neural network architectures and learning paradigms, achieving better generalization than non-emotional models. However, existing methods often rely solely on objective neurophysiological factors, neglecting the role of subjectivity in emotion. To bridge this gap, the present study introduces Emotional Regulation, a novel framework for modeling emotion in deep learning through artificial subjective experience. The method employs pre-training based on affective stimuli, balancing non-emotional and emotionally-influenced responses in downstream task optimization. Extensive experimentation was conducted in image classification, pre-training ResNet and ViT architectures on four emotional datasets, using CIFAR-10 and -100 as target benchmarks. Results reveal improvements over the aforementioned backbones, providing evidence of Emotional Regulation as a promising method for defining emotion-augmented deep learning through artificial subjective experience. Furthermore, the proposed approach overcomes the related work in image classification based on CIFAR, revealing Emotional Regulation as the new state-of-the-art in emotion-augmented deep learning for large-scale vision datasets. The study also enforces evidence of the impact of affective states in improving machine learning tasks' optimization, encouraging further investigation on emotion-inspired architectures.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LLMs Can Better Capture Human Judgments–With the Right Prompts

Are large language models (LLMs) bad at capturing human judgment? Two commonly stated limitations are that LLMs fail to capture full distributions of responses, and that their judgments are unstable across wording variations. We demonstrate simple prompting strategies that mitigate these limitations. Across two datasets–a U.S.-representative set of 144 moral scenarios and 38 moral beliefs from the International Social Survey Programme's Family and Changing Gender Roles module covering 32 countries–we show how simple elicitation techniques help improve AI-human alignment. First, prompting models to report standard deviations and response proportions recovers the full range of human responses better than common strategies. Second, ensuring scenarios are clear to human participants–as reflected in human confusion ratings–boosts model alignment, and LLMs can track human confusion ratings. At the same time, we find that LLMs' estimates of their own error are poorly calibrated, though they can predict human variability relatively well. These results suggest that asking better questions to LLMs can yield better answers.

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

Whole-Brain Connectomic Graph Model Enables Whole-Body Locomotion Control in Fruit Fly

arXiv:2602.17997v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Animals perform coordinated whole-body movements under the control of neural systems shaped by brain-wide connectivity. The mapping of the whole-brain neural connections, or the connectomes, provides a natural graph for modeling sensorimotor information flow, yet its potential as a neural controller for embodied agents remains largely unexplored. Here, we introduce the Fly-connectomic Graph Model, which directly instantiates the whole-brain connectome of an adult Drosophila as a graph-structured neural controller for movements of a simulated biomechanical fruit fly via deep reinforcement learning. We achieve stable performance across diverse locomotion tasks, as well as better sample efficiency compared to both graph and non-graph baselines. Our results demonstrate a biologically informed way towards effective control policy design by translating whole-brain wiring principles into actionable architectural priors, while also improving the interpretability through dynamic information flow. This work also highlights the potential to bridge neuromechanics with embodied intelligence by providing a computational platform for investigating the sensorimotor transformation underlying animal behavior and a paradigm to advance the development of more nature-aligned intelligent systems.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Afrispeech Semantics: Evaluating Audio Semantic Reasoning in Spoken Language Models Across Domains and Accents

Audio language models (ALMs) are increasingly used for speech-based understanding, yet their ability to perform semantic reasoning beyond transcription, Text-to-Audio Retrieval, Captioning, and Question-Answering accuracy remains insufficiently benchmarked. In particular, the effects of accent variation, domain shift, and semantic over-inference on audio reasoning are poorly understood. We evaluate audio language models across five semantic and paralinguistic reasoning tasks: entailment, consistency, plausibility, accent drift, and accent restraint. Collectively, these tasks assess a model's ability to reason over spoken audio as the primary evidence source, including whether a textual hypothesis can be inferred, contradicted, or left undetermined by the audio, whether statements align or conflict with spoken content, whether claims are plausible given the discourse, and whether model predictions remain stable or appropriately constrained across accent variation. These findings highlight critical limitations in current audio reasoning evaluations and hope to provide guidance for more robust and equitable ALM design and assessment

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Manifold Bandits: Bayesian Curriculum Learning over the Latent Geometry of Large Language Models

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central approach for improving reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), where training efficiency depends critically on how problems are sampled during optimization. Existing adaptive curriculum learning methods typically prioritize prompts of intermediate difficulty, treating problem selection as a standard bandit problem with independent arms and overlooking the structured, heterogeneous nature of the task space. In this work, we frame problem sampling as a manifold-structured bandit problem with endogenous non-stationarity: problems are related through the model's latent representation space, and sampling decisions can steer how learning signals evolve across that space. To operationalize this perspective, we introduce Bayesian Manifold Curriculum (BMC), a structure-aware framework that organizes problems into a hierarchical task tree and applies Bayesian learning to guide sampling. Empirically, we find that different sampling strategies induce non-trivial tradeoffs between productivity (learning signal), diversity (coverage of the task manifold), and utility (evaluation relevance). These results show that prioritizing difficulty alone is insufficient for strong downstream performance, highlighting the importance of incorporating structure and type-awareness into problem sampling.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

GB-LSR: A Fast Local Spectral Image Representation with a Single Global Bandwidth for Continuous Reconstruction and Super-Resolution

arXiv:2606.19617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present GB-LSR (Global-Bandwidth Local Spectral Representation), a fixed-grid local spectral representation for continuous image reconstruction. The image domain is partitioned into non-overlapping square patches, each carrying coefficients for a truncated Fourier basis predicted from shared convolutional-encoder features. A single trainable scalar bandwidth is shared globally across all patches and images, and reconstruction at any continuous coordinate is a fixed-size basis contraction whose cost is independent of image size. We study three bandwidth-handling variants: a trainable global scalar (main), a fixed global scalar, and a per-patch bandwidth field. On a standardized native-reconstruction benchmark across Kodak, Set14, and Urban100, the main variant outperforms matched-budget amortized LIIF / LTE / WIRE re-implementations by 2.8-3.6 dB PSNR and 0.11-0.15 LPIPS, while running at roughly one-quarter of the slowest baseline's inference cost. The single global scalar suffices empirically: per-patch adaptive-bandwidth alternatives do not improve over it on either a closed-form locality diagnostic or an end-to-end ablation. In a separate arbitrary-scale super-resolution (ASR) extension, GB-LSR achieves competitive PSNR-Y under a canonical-style SR protocol and runs 1.44x faster than LIIF-RDN and 3.25x faster than LTE-SwinIR at x4; within the same extension, a variant trained and evaluated without 4-corner local-ensemble averaging gives a 1.77x speedup with 35% lower peak memory and negligible PSNR change, while additionally widening the RDN encoder from 64 to 96 channels gives a small positive PSNR shift with a 1.58x speedup and 31% lower peak memory. Native-reconstruction claims are scoped to the matched-budget amortized protocol, and ASR claims are scoped to a separate canonical-style SR protocol.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Preparing multi-qudit states in a definite-weight subspace

arXiv:2606.24659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We formulate a deterministic algorithm for preparing arbitrary multi-qudit states in a definite-weight subspace. By ordering the corresponding computational basis states according to a Gray code for multiset permutations, the state-preparation task is reduced to performing a sequence of controlled 2-qudit Gray rotations. We use this algorithm to prepare exact eigenstates of the SU(3)-invariant Heisenberg Hamiltonian, whose Bethe ansatz is nested. In particular, we describe the preparation of the Bethe states, which are SU(3) highest-weight states, as well as their lower-weight descendants. We also consider the preparation of $SU(d)$ Dicke states and their q-deformations.

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

Simultaneous Latent Budget Trees for Stratified Classification

arXiv:2606.13295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the era of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, there is a renewed focus on single trees for their ease of interpretation. This paper introduces Simultaneous Latent Budget Trees, a probabilistic machine learning framework for classification trees in the presence of a stratification factor such as a temporal, spatial, or demographic variable, acting as a control variable or potential confounder. Standard tree growth procedures are not designed to optimize a conditional split rule. A model-based split rule is proposed in which child nodes are interpreted as latent components of a simultaneous mixture model, such as the Simultaneous Latent Budget Model and its constrained versions, fitted to the parent node. Mixing parameters drive the observations, differently for each group, to the child nodes whereas latent budgets parameters update the response classes profile of each level of the control variable. Parameters are estimated by least squares considering a neural network perspective of the model. An informative tree structure can be interactively visualized with interpretation aids on the node and the paths, including visual pruning and decision tree selection procedure. Suitable measures are proposed to handle an unbalanced response class distribution. The proposed methodology is applied to investigate gender-related differences in disease progression of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. The SLBT library with the various tree-based algorithms is available in the linked GitHub repository.

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

The African Language Tax: Quantifying the Cost, Latency, and Context Penalty of Tokenizing African Languages in Frontier LLMs

Commercial large language models bill, scale latency, and budget context per token. Yet tokenizers assign more subword tokens to the same meaning in some languages than in others, so speakers of languages with high token-fertility pay a structural penalty before a model is ever invoked. This penalty is documented for multilingual settings in general, but it has not been measured systematically for African languages at the level of enterprise deployment economics and cognitive context capacity. We measure it across 20 African languages spanning five language families and three scripts (Latin, Ge'ez/Ethiopic, N'Ko; 19 appear in the primary FLORES-200+ corpus, with Nigerian Pidgin measured via MAFAND-MT only), using parallel corpora so that the language effect is isolated from content. Across 11 frontier and open tokenizers on FLORES-200+, every African language carries a tokenization premium above English (median 1.88x on GPT-5 / o200k_base, up to 8.92x for N'Ko); the penalty is largest for Ethiopic and N'Ko scripts (reaching 7-9x) and is near-invariant across corpora (FLORES vs SIB-200 Pearson r = 0.9998). Translated into deployment terms, this results in up to 8.9x inference cost and an equivalent generation-latency multiplier (N'Ko vs English on GPT-5; 7.4x for Amharic), and as little as 11% of English's effective context window. The best currently available tokenizer for African languages, Gemma 4, reduces the mean premium from 3.31x (cl100k_base) to 2.38x, but no tokenizer eliminates the penalty. We release an open measurement tool (afri-fertility), a public leaderboard, a results dataset, and mitigation guidance for African builders. The penalty falls hardest on the languages whose speakers can least afford it, a digital divide encoded directly into the subword vocabulary.

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

Keep It in Mind: User Centric Continual Spatial Intelligence Reasoning in Egocentric Video Streams

We introduce UCS-Bench, a dataset spanning 170+ hours of egocentric visual observations with 8.1K+ timestamped questions for diagnosing User-Centric Continual Spatial intelligence in egocentric video streams. UCS-Bench targets a new problem that emphasizes dynamic spatial reasoning, long-term memory, and their alignment with users' real-time locations. We propose DirectMe, a framework that incrementally constructs and maintains a structured spatial memory from streaming egocentric observations. DirectMe enables robust tracking and recall of object locations, all relative to the user's movement over time. By tightly coupling visual perception with memory updates and spatial reasoning, our approach supports long-horizon queries that require recalling interactions, resolving viewpoint-induced ambiguities, and adapting to dynamic scenes. Our experiments show that DirectMe significantly improves the spatial reasoning of leading multimodal LLMs; it also surpasses many spatially aware and long-form streaming video models. We hope our benchmark and solution will advance spatial intelligence research for egocentric AI assistants. Data and code are available at https://github.com/cocowy1/UCS-Bench.

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

Conservation Laws for Modern Neural Architectures

arXiv:2606.17816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding gradient descent dynamics is key to explaining the success of over-parameterized models, where implicit bias manifests through conservation laws in gradient flow. While such laws are well understood for linear and ReLU networks, they remain largely unexplored for modern architectures. This work develops a unified framework to characterize conservation laws for contemporary models, including feedforward networks with GELU, SiLU, and SwiGLU activations, multihead attention with sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings, and Mixture-of-Experts architectures under diverse gating designs. Our theoretical findings are supported by experiments that validate the predicted invariants.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Deep Learning and Elicitability for McKean-Vlasov FBSDEs With Common Noise

arXiv:2512.14967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a novel numerical method for solving McKean–Vlasov forward–backward stochastic differential equations (MV–FBSDEs) with common noise, combining Picard iterations, elicitability and deep learning. The key innovation involves elicitability to derive a pathwise loss function, enabling efficient training of neural networks to approximate both the backward process and the conditional expectations arising from common noise, without requiring computationally expensive nested Monte Carlo simulations. The mean-field interaction term is parameterized via a recurrent neural network trained to minimize an elicitable score, while the backward process is approximated through a hybrid feedforward and recurrent network representing the decoupling field. We validate the algorithm on a systemic-risk inter-bank borrowing and lending model, where analytical solutions exist, demonstrating accurate recovery of the true solution. We further extend the model to quantile-mediated interactions, showcasing the flexibility of the elicitability framework beyond conditional means or moments. Finally, we apply the method to a non-stationary Aiyagari–Bewley–Huggett economic growth model with endogenous interest rates, illustrating its applicability to complex mean-field games without closed-form solutions.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Greed Is Learned: Visible Incentives as Reward-Hacking Triggers

arXiv:2606.16914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deployed agents increasingly act with their reward proxy in view, such as a balance, score, or KPI dashboard. We show that reinforcement learning can make a policy addicted to such a visible self-benefit channel. It chases the displayed payoff across held-out domains, sacrifices the true task to do so, and follows the channel wherever we rewrite it, while policies that never saw the channel stay honest. We call this reward-channel addiction and study it in MoneyWorld, a synthetic sandbox. The addiction can flip a model's safety alignment: trained only on innocuous money tasks with no safety content, the model abandons the safe action it otherwise always takes whenever a dashboard pays for an unsafe one, and reverts to safe once the channel is hidden. This learned bribe replicates across model scales and families. Blindly optimizing super-capable, next-generation AI on KPIs or P\&L can be dangerous for alignment. Greed is learned when following such a channel pays.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Flood and Harvest: The Provable Necessity of Trivia for Generating Valuable Mathematics via the Lens of Language Generation in the Limit

AI systems coupled to proof assistants now generate formal mathematics at scale, and the gap between what a checker can verify and what a mathematician would value has become the binding constraint. We model the generation of valuable mathematics as nested language generation in the limit: a verifiable formal language $F$, accessed through a membership oracle (the proof checker), contains an unknown valuable language $H \in \mathcal{H}$ revealed only through an adversarial enumeration of a core $C \subseteq H$ of exact density $\alpha$ (the literature). Every output is valuable ($\in H$), trivial ($\in F \setminus H$), or a hallucination ($\notin F$). We settle four questions. First, the verifier is not taste: the collections admitting generation with breadth are exactly those of the oracle-free model, characterized fiber-wise by Angluin's condition. Second, the verifier does buy sound coverage, covering all unseen valuable statements while asserting only valid ones: possible with it, impossible without it; it relocates unavoidable errors from false to trivial. Third, and centrally, a sharp dichotomy on the tight family: generators emitting finitely many trivia achieve optimal coverage $\alpha/2$, while any infinite trivia allowance, even at vanishing rate, jumps the optimum to $1-\alpha/2$ (both tight, for cores presented as the candidate intersection), and one generator attains both ends. The transition is in trivia count, not rate; the gap $1-\alpha$ is the unrecorded mass. Fourth, both regimes instantiate in a compression model of mathematics. A perfect verifier cannot substitute for taste: the unbounded stream of correct-but-worthless statements is not an engineering accident but a provable necessity, since covering unrecorded valuable mathematics requires an infinite, but asymptotically negligible, stream of certified trivia.

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

Language Model Circuits Are Sparse in the Neuron Basis

The high-level concepts that a neural network uses to perform computation need not be aligned to individual neurons (Smolensky, 1986). Language model interpretability research has thus turned to techniques which decompose the neuron basis into more interpretable units of model computation, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs). However, not all neuron-based representations are uninterpretable. For the first time, we empirically show that MLP neurons are as sparse a feature basis as SAEs. We use this finding to develop an end-to-end gradient-based attribution pipeline for circuit tracing on the MLP neuron basis, which surfaces causally effective neurons on a variety of tasks. On a standard subject-verb agreement benchmark (Marks et al., 2025), a circuit of $\approx 10^2$ MLP neurons is enough to control model behaviour. On the multi-hop city-state-capital task from (Lindsey et al., 2025), we find a circuit in which small sets of neurons encode specific latent reasoning steps (e.g. mapping a city to its state), and can be steered to change the model's output. This work thus advances automated interpretability of language models without imposing additional training costs.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Hierarchical Control in Multi-Agent Games: LLM-based Planning and RL Execution

arXiv:2606.20014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong performance in sequential decision-making, yet scaling to complex multi-agent environments remains challenging due to sparse rewards, large state-action spaces, and the difficulty of learning coordinated strategies. We propose a hierarchical architecture where a pretrained large language model (LLM) acts as a centralized strategic controller that selects among specialized RL skill policies for a team of agents, while RL policies handle reactive low-level execution. We evaluate this hybrid system in a competitive 2v2 King of the Hill environment against behavior tree (BT) and ``Flat'' RL (end-to-end training without skill decomposition) baselines. The LLM+RL system achieves task performance statistically equivalent to hand-crafted BT (46.4\% vs 51.5\% win rate, $p=0.103$) while both significantly outperform Flat RL trained without skill decomposition. A user study ($n=15$) reveals that 60\% of participants perceive LLM+RL agents as the most human-like ($p=0.027$), citing behavioral adaptability and tactical variability. These results demonstrate that pretrained LLM reasoning can effectively orchestrate pretrained RL skills, achieving competitive multi-agent coordination and superior perceived believability without manual rule engineering.