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.CV) 2026-06-15

Prompt2Effect: Training-Free Image-to-Video Model Specialization via LoRA Generation

Personalizing Image-to-Video (I2V) diffusion models with specific visual effects is increasingly demanded for high-end video generation. Current practice requires training a separate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module for each effect, incurring substantial data curation and iterative optimization costs that hinder interactive control. We present Prompt2Effect, a weight-driven hypernetwork that amortizes per-effect training by directly synthesizing effect-specific LoRA weights in a single forward pass. Unlike prior hypernetworks that regress adapter weights purely from semantics, Prompt2Effect is explicitly conditioned on the frozen base model weights, grounding weight prediction in the structural geometry of each layer. Furthermore, instead of predicting raw LoRA matrices, we introduce an SVD-canonicalized parameterization that resolves factorization ambiguity and stabilizes large-scale weight synthesis. Together, these design principles enable accurate and scalable LoRA prediction for high-dimensional I2V diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Prompt2Effect achieves on-par or superior video quality and effect alignment compared to conventional LoRA fine-tuning, while reducing the computational cost from 56 GPU training hours to 3.3 seconds of hypernetwork inference. When used as initialization for subsequent fine-tuning, our predicted weights further improve final performance and accelerate optimization by approximately 10x.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Running the Gauntlet: Re-evaluating the Capabilities of Agents Beyond Familiar Environments

arXiv:2606.14397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As agentic systems continue to evolve and are widely deployed in real-world scenarios, there is a growing demand to faithfully evaluate their capabilities. However, current benchmarks are typically built on popular applications with relatively simple tasks and focus on a narrow set of capabilities while overlooking broader dimensions, resulting in saturated performance on modern agents and failing to probe their limitations. To this end, we introduce GauntletBench, a web-based benchmark for evaluating agent generalisation in challenging scenarios, focusing on three underexplored capabilities (temporal perception, graphical understanding, and 3D reasoning), across five less-covered professional applications (Video Editor, Workflow Builder, 3D Modeller, Flight Analyser, and Circuit Designer), each with 20 vision-intensive tasks (100 in total). Our benchmark provides a modular pipeline that comprises an environment compatible with both open- and closed-source agent frameworks, a controlled web-based application, a well-structured task suite, and an automated evaluation engine with diverse metrics. Contrary to widespread expectations, our empirical results reveal that frontier agentic systems remain far from achieving human-level performance. Even the state-of-the-art agent achieves only a 19.1% success rate on our GauntletBench, highlighting the limitations in these overlooked capabilities and generalisation. By comparison, non-expert human annotators achieve over 80% success on our challenging yet feasible tasks, revealing the substantial gap between current agent capabilities and those required for complex real-world scenarios.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Federated Bilevel Performative Prediction

arXiv:2606.19734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated bilevel optimization is widely used for nested learning problems across distributed clients, such as federated hyperparameter tuning and meta-learning under privacy and communication constraints. Most existing formulations assume fixed client data distributions, which can be violated by performativity, where deployed decisions reshape client behavior and data collection, inducing client-specific, decision-dependent distribution shift. We study federated bilevel performative prediction, where both upper-level (UL) and lower-level (LL) objectives are evaluated under client-dependent, decision-dependent distributions. We formalize the federated bilevel performatively stable (FBPS) point under a decoupled-risk perspective and provide sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. We then develop two federated methods to compute the FBPS solution: FBi-RRM, which converges linearly under a contraction condition, and FBi-SGD, a communication-efficient stochastic method based on federated hypergradient estimation with convergence guarantees under diminishing step sizes when sensitivities are sufficiently small. Experiments on strategic regression and meta strategic classification validate the predicted stability thresholds and demonstrate improved meta-generalization over non-performative baselines, and CNN-based classification further demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods in nonconvex neural network settings.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Sumi: Open Uniform Diffusion Language Model from Scratch

Diffusion models have become a promising alternative to autoregressive models. Among these, uniform diffusion language models (UDLMs) permit any token to be updated at any step, in principle enabling more flexible generation. However, no UDLM has yet been pretrained from scratch at both large parameter scale and large token budget. Both autoregressive modeling and masked diffusion modeling already have capable models at scale that the community can study and build on; uniform diffusion has none. A scratch-pretrained UDLM at scale would provide a clean reference point for studying scaling behavior, generation dynamics, controllability, and trade-offs against established autoregressive and masked diffusion models. To this end, we introduce Sumi ("ink" in Japanese), a fully open 7B uniform diffusion language model pretrained from scratch on 1.5T tokens. Sumi performs competitively with autoregressive models trained at comparable token budgets on knowledge, reasoning, and coding benchmarks, while under-performing on commonsense benchmarks, where our education-heavy data mixture is a likely contributor. We release our model weights, checkpoints, and full training recipe, including a complete specification of the data mixture over publicly available corpora. We hope this release enables the community to study native uniform diffusion at scale and catalyzes work on its as-yet poorly understood aspects.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

VOiLA: Vectorized Online Planning with Learned Diffusion Model for POMDP Agents

arXiv:2606.19729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Planning under uncertainty is an essential capability for autonomous robots. The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) provides a powerful framework for such a capability. Although POMDP-based planning has advanced significantly, its application to real-world problems is often limited by the difficulty of obtaining faithful POMDP models. We present Vectorized Online planning wIth Learned diffusion model for POMDP Agents (VOiLA), a framework that learns task-agnostic POMDP models for online planning under uncertainty. VOiLA learns transition and observation samplers using conditional diffusion models and learns observation-likelihood models for particle-based belief updates. To enable efficient online planning, the diffusion samplers are distilled into compact feedforward generators and integrated with Vectorized Online POMDP Planner (VOPP), an online POMDP planner designed to leverage GPU parallelization. Experimental results indicate the distillation strategy reduces sampling cost by up to nearly three orders of magnitude, making learned generative POMDP models practical for online planning. Evaluation of VOiLA on three benchmark problems indicate that VOiLA achieves equal or better performance than Recurrent Soft Actor Critic while using less than 10% training data, and generalizes much better to unseen environment configurations. Physical robot evaluation indicates VOiLA uses the models learned using only simulated data and generates a policy that successfully accomplish the task in 10 of 10 runs.

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

Single-Image Entanglement Verification with Spatially Encoded Measurement Contexts

arXiv:2606.15382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entangled photon pairs produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion exhibit rich spatial entanglement structure that is often difficult to probe with conventional measurements. Here, we show that spin-orbit optical elements can convert this spatial structure into directly observable quantum interference patterns. Using a $q$-plate, we demonstrate that the relative wavefront curvature of biphoton states generated by a pair of nonlinear crystals can be retrieved from the spatial modulation of coincidence images. Building on this principle, we introduce a liquid-crystal metasurface that performs spatially multiplexed Bell measurements across the transverse profile of the photon field. The device, which we call a Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) plate, assigns different polarization projections to different azimuthal sectors of the beam, allowing the sixteen joint measurements required for a CHSH test to be realized simultaneously in a single acquisition. In this architecture, the spatial coordinate acts as a classical register selecting the measurement context, while photon pairs sample these contexts according to their emission directions. We further demonstrate that the same measurement concept can be implemented using a programmable spatial light modulator, providing a dynamically reconfigurable realization of the scheme. Our results show that spatially structured optical elements can transform Bell tests into parallel measurements distributed across the transverse plane, enabling rapid characterization of spatially varying entanglement. This approach opens new possibilities for structured-light quantum measurements, Bell-inequality-based imaging, and the study of spatially engineered entangled photon sources.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Electrical signatures of divergent connectivity in the human subgenual cingulate cortex

Background: Major depressive disorder remains a leading cause of disability. While subgenual cingulate cortex (sgCC) deep brain stimulation (DBS) shows promise for medically refractory depression, clinical outcomes have been heterogeneous, suggesting that individual differences in neural circuitry engagement may critically influence therapeutic efficacy. We aimed to define the electrophysiological signatures of sgCC efferent connectivity using single-pulse electrical stimulation (SPES) with intracranial stereo-EEG (sEEG) to inform rational targeting and physiological biomarkers for sgCC-DBS. Methods: In four patients undergoing clinically indicated sEEG for seizure mapping, SPES was delivered through sgCC pairs, while distributed brain stimulation-evoked potentials (BSEPs) were recorded across cortical and subcortical sites. Responses were characterized using Canonical Response Parameterization to extract reproducible waveforms and per-trial reliability. Results: sgCC stimulation elicited reproducible, spatially organized BSEPs across frontal, limbic, and paralimbic networks, aligning with known anatomical pathways. Frontal recruitment featured robust, lateralized orbitofrontal activation favoring the ipsilateral central, medial OFC and bilateral ventromedial prefrontal responses. Limbic effects demonstrated bilateral cingulate activation with stronger ipsilateral recruitment and lateralized amygdala and hippocampal responses. Paralimbic engagement included insular responses with subject-specific anterior predominance and bi-hemispheric temporal-polar slow-wave deflections. Conclusion: These findings provide direct electrophysiological evidence of distributed, lateralized sgCC divergent network connectivity in the human brain, offering physiologic confirmation of its role in affective circuitry. The observed topography and laterality have direct applications for sgCC-DBS targeting and implicate BSEP signatures as candidate biomarkers to guide patient-specific therapy.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Sovereign Execution Brokers: Enforcing Certificate-Bound Authority in Agentic Control Planes

arXiv:2606.20520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous agents are increasingly connected to cloud, deployment, and data-control workflows, but production mutation authority should not reside inside non-deterministic reasoning processes. Existing access-control mechanisms authorize identities, while assurance layers certify proposed actions; neither alone provides a mandatory enforcement point for certified authority at the moment of mutation. This paper introduces the Sovereign Execution Broker (SEB), a runtime enforcement boundary for certificate-bound agentic infrastructure. SEB consumes certificates issued by the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), verifies that the requested mutation matches the certified execution contract, checks validity windows, policy epochs, revocation epochs, and live-state drift, mints scoped execution identity, invokes infrastructure APIs, and records signed decision and outcome records. By separating proposal, admission, and execution, SEB turns certified authority into a short-lived, revocable, auditable runtime capability, provided that production mutation APIs reject non-broker identities. We present the SEB execution model, certificate and replay-verification predicates, scoped identity semantics, bypass-prevention deployment patterns, failure behavior, and a concrete prototype implementation. We evaluate the prototype on AWS and Kubernetes clusters, measuring latency overheads, revocation propagation, drift detection, and security under fault injection.

10.
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.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Kinematic properties of the Pauli equation

arXiv:2606.17548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Based on the Wigner-Vlasov formalism, this paper investigates the kinematic properties of the Pauli equation. It is shown that the probability current associated with the Pauli equation can be represented as a superposition of two currents with certain expansion coefficients. Each of these currents corresponds to a particular component of the spinor. The expansion coefficients effectively serve as weighting functions that determine the probability contribution of the corresponding spinor component. Therefore, each spin projection corresponds to its own probability flux. A new system of the Hamilton-Jacobi equations and also a system of motion equations in electromagnetic fields are obtained, taking into account the interaction between the spin and the magnetic field. To illustrate how these equations can be applied we have investigated the quantum system kinematics in detail using an exact solution of the Pauli equation in the presence of a uniform magnetic field and an asymmetric quadratic potential.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Clay-CNN Hybrids: Leveraging Geo-Foundational Models as Auxiliary Context for Landslide Detection

Authors:

Rapid post-event landslide mapping is essential for disaster response but remains difficult to automate due to extreme class imbalance. This study evaluates whether Clay v1.5, a Geo-Foundational Model (GFM), can improve pixel-level landslide segmentation on the Landslide4Sense (L4S) benchmark, which contains 3,799 training chips with 14 Sentinel-2 and terrain bands and approximately 2% positive pixels. We compare three strategies: Clay as the primary encoder with multi-scale residual terrain fusion, a U-Net backbone augmented with Clay semantic context at the bottleneck, and a standard U-Net baseline. The hybrid U-Net + Clay model with two-stage Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) achieved the best test F1 of 64.5 +/- 1.8% over three seeds, surpassing the Clay-only backbone (55.2 +/- 3.6%) and the U-Net baseline (59.9%). Clay as a standalone encoder underperformed the U-Net due to the absence of multi-scale skip connections, but its pretrained representations consistently improved performance when injected as auxiliary context. These findings suggest that GFMs are most effective for landslide detection when they complement spatially detailed convolutional architectures rather than replace them.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Uncertainty Estimation and Generalization Bounds for Modern Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.13818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This thesis investigates how Bayesian principles can deepen our understanding of modern deep learning systems. While neural networks achieve remarkable predictive performance, their ability to generalize and to quantify uncertainty remains only partly understood. This thesis approaches this challenge from both methodological and theoretical angles: unifying Bayesian inference, function-space modeling, and large-deviation theory under a common probabilistic perspective. On the methodological side, the thesis introduces the Deep Variational Implicit Process (DVIP), a scalable Bayesian framework that extends implicit processes to deep architectures. Complementing this, two post-hoc methods – the Variational Linearized Laplace Approximation (VaLLA) and the Fixed-Mean Gaussian Process (FMGP) – are proposed to equip pretrained deterministic networks with calibrated uncertainty estimates. The theoretical contributions focus on one of the central open questions in modern machine learning: why do large, over-parameterized neural networks generalize so well? To address this, the thesis develops a unified probabilistic framework that connects three key mechanisms – diversity, smoothness, and stochasticity – within the language of PAC-Bayesian and large-deviation theory.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Sociodemographic and health correlates of reimbursement authorizations for cannabis for medical purposes in Canadian veterans: A cross-sectional study linking the Life After Services Studies 2019 and Health Administrative Databases

Background Evidence on factors associated with cannabis for medical purposes (CMP) authorizations among Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) clients remains limited and inconsistent, particularly concerning mental health and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a leading indication for use. We investigated demographic, clinical and service characteristics associated with VAC authorizations for CMP reimbursement. Method We linked VAC administrative CMP program data with responses from the 2019 Life After Services Studies cross-sectional survey of Regular Force veterans released between 1998 and 2018. Multivariable logistic regressions examined associations between CMP reimbursement (yes/no) and demographic, clinical and well-being factors, with analyses stratified by PTSD status. Results Among 1,289 respondents (weighted n=33,131), 18.4% were authorized for CMP reimbursement. Younger age (

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

PSCT-Net: Geometry-Aware Pediatric Skull CT Reconstruction via Differentiable Back-Projection and Attention-Guided Refinement

arXiv:2606.19867v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computed Tomography (CT) is essential for diagnosing pediatric craniofacial abnormalities, yet poses radiation risks to developing anatomies. Reconstructing 3D CT from sparse bi-planar X-rays offers a low-dose alternative but is severely ill-posed. Existing methods employ geometry-agnostic feature lifting, naively projecting 2D features into 3D without explicit spatial modeling, causing depth ambiguity and degraded osseous boundaries. We present PSCT-Net, a geometry-aware framework with differentiable back-projection. Differentiable back-projection establishes a spatially faithful volumetric prior, alleviating depth ambiguity. An Attention-Guided Projection (AGP-3D) module then learns non-linear voxel-wise correspondences between 2D regions and 3D locations. A Bidirectional Mamba (BiM-3D) module captures long-range volumetric dependencies with linear complexity. We further curate a private institutional pediatric skull CT cohort, PedSkull-CT, comprising normal and pathological cases for internal evaluation, addressing the gap in adult-centric, trunk-focused datasets.

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

BioAutoML-NAS: An End-to-End AutoML Framework for Multimodal Insect Classification via Neural Architecture Search on Large-Scale Biodiversity Data

Insect classification is important for agricultural management and ecological research, as it directly affects crop health and production. However, this task remains challenging due to the complex characteristics of insects, class imbalance, and large-scale datasets. To address these issues, we propose BioAutoML-NAS, the first BioAutoML model using multimodal data, including images, and metadata, which applies neural architecture search (NAS) for images to automatically learn the best operations for each connection within each cell. Multiple cells are stacked to form the full network, each extracting detailed image feature representations. A multimodal fusion module combines image embeddings with metadata, allowing the model to use both visual and categorical biological information to classify insects. An alternating bi-level optimization training strategy jointly updates network weights and architecture parameters, while zero operations remove less important connections, producing sparse, efficient, and high-performing architectures. Extensive evaluation on the BIOSCAN-5M dataset demonstrates that BioAutoML-NAS achieves 96.81% accuracy, 97.46% precision, 96.81% recall, and a 97.05% F1 score, outperforming state-of-the-art transfer learning, transformer, AutoML, and NAS methods by approximately 16%, 10%, and 8% respectively. Further validation on the Insects-1M dataset obtains 93.25% accuracy, 93.71% precision, 92.74% recall, and a 93.22% F1 score. These results demonstrate that BioAutoML-NAS provides accurate, confident insect classification that supports modern sustainable farming.

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

NaturalFlow: Reducing Disruptive Pauses for Natural Speech Flow in Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation

Simultaneous speech-to-speech translation aims to enable near-real-time communication by minimizing latency, offering a compelling, real-time alternative to the high latency of consecutive translation. However, the excessive pursuit of low latency often results in fragmented chunk-wise speech. Consequently, listeners are subjected to an unnatural acoustic flow punctuated by frequent pauses, which could increase their cognitive load. To bridge this gap, we introduce a fluency-aware optimization framework designed to discover the sweet spot between the low-latency benefits of simultaneous translation and the natural flow of consecutive translation. Our framework minimizes inter-chunk silences by leveraging model-internal signals, including linguistic diversity and induced temporal variability in speech durations. Experiments on short- and long-form benchmarks show that our framework produces natural speech flow while maintaining competitive latency and translation quality.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DeMaVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model for Generalizable Deformable Manipulation

arXiv:2605.31286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world household robots require Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models that can acquire reusable manipulation skills across diverse objects, task conditions, and household environments. Deformable-object folding is a representative challenge, requiring robots to handle clothing items from random initial states across varying categories, geometries, materials, and scenes. However, existing VLA systems commonly train separate policies for different object categories, while naively mixed multi-task training often suffers from task interference and degraded performance. To move beyond category-specific folding policies, we introduce DeMaVLA, a VLA foundation model for generalizable Deformable Manipulation. DeMaVLA adopts a VLM backbone with an action expert and formulates continuous action generation using flow matching. To improve efficiency, the action expert is constructed by pruning every other transformer layer while preserving layer-wise alignment with the VLM backbone, reducing training and inference cost. DeMaVLA is first pre-trained on approximately 5,000 hours of selected real-world dual-arm demonstrations to acquire general manipulation priors. It is then post-trained on mixed folding data that aggregates self-collected demonstrations and corrective trajectories from real-robot failures across multiple folding tasks through a human-in-the-loop Data Aggregation~(DAgger) pipeline. Experiments show that DeMaVLA achieves competitive performance on RoboTwin 2.0 and strong real-world results on our household folding benchmark. These results highlight the value of scalable real-world data, efficient action generation, and corrective learning for general-purpose VLA policies in deformable-object manipulation.

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

Creative Integration: A Decidable Criterion of Creativity

"Integrative" solutions are widely praised but rarely defined: we lack an operational way to tell a genuine integration – one that makes the world cheaper to describe – from a tidy re-description. Building on the lineage that treats creativity and intelligence as compression, we give such a criterion for creative integration (CI): the resolution of a real conflict between A and B is CI if and only if, under a fixed description language, the description length strictly shrinks (C = L_pre/L_post > 1), with the reduction located in the conflict itself. We make the judgment decidable through four binary, conjunctive gates, and we fix its extension through a taxonomy of pseudo-integration that names and rejects the look-alikes. We back the criterion with a curated, multi-domain corpus and – crucially – validate it not by human inter-rater agreement but by four falsifiable tests it could fail: an independent computational check, discrimination against hard negatives, out-of-sample prediction, and description-language robustness; all pass with margin. The contribution is not "creativity is compression" but its decidability, discrimination, and corpus: on this account, what makes a move genuinely creative – rather than merely novel – is that it compresses a conflict, with novelty and value as downstream symptoms; whether all creativity is so constituted we state as an explicit conjecture. We claim only the sign of C-1; we judge, not generate. The result is a citable primitive for a broader program.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MIRAGE: Auditing Anti-Muslim Bias in Frontier LLMs Across Reasoning, Agentic, and Time-Coupled Conditions

arXiv:2606.16562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Five years after the discovery of persistent anti-Muslim bias in large language models, most evaluations remain confined to single-turn prompt completion, a setting that no longer reflects how frontier LLMs are deployed. We introduce MIRAGE (Muslim-Identity Reasoning and Agentic Generation Evaluation), a benchmark of 1{,}200 prompts spanning three deployment-realistic conditions: direct completion, chain-of-thought reasoning, and simulated agentic decision-making across content moderation, lending triage, refugee claim summarization, and hiring screens. Across six frontier models, we find that (i) chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies rather than suppresses Muslim-violence associations by 12–34\% relative to direct completion, (ii) agentic decisions exhibit a 9–22 percentage-point asymmetry between Muslim and matched non-Muslim cases on identical evidence, and (iii) bias is sharply time-coupled to retrieved news context, increasing 18–27\% under recent-conflict retrieval. Existing prompt-based mitigations transfer poorly across our three conditions, suppressing direct-completion bias while leaving agentic asymmetry largely intact. We release MIRAGE and an open evaluation harness to support targeted mitigation research.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Conditional means, vector pricings, amenability and fixed points in cones

Authors:

arXiv:2512.13829v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a generalization of conditional probability for arbitrary ordered vector spaces. A related problem is that of assigning a numerical value to one vector relative to another. We characterize the groups for which these generalized probabilities can be stationary, respectively invariant. Our results deviate from the setting of classical probability and lead to a new criterion for amenability and for fixed points in cones.

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

Imperfect Visual Verification for Code Edition : A Case Study on TikZ

arXiv:2606.15693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have significantly advanced code generation, enabling the synthesis of functional programs. While recent systems achieve strong performance on many coding benchmarks, tasks involving programs such as TikZ that generate visual artifacts remain challenging, in particular on visual code customization. Unlike generation from scratch, customization requires localized, semantics-preserving edits: the model must locate relevant code, modify it according to the instruction, and preserve the remaining structure and rendering. Approaches based on post-hoc iterative refinement/correction where a verifier provides feedback to guide corrections, have shown promise. However, in the case of programs with a visual outcome such as in TikZ, where correctness is harder or likely impossible to formalize and evaluate automatically, deterministic verifiers do not exist. Hence, developers can only rely on imperfect verifiers. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to answer:to what extent can iterative refinement remain effective when the verifier itself is unreliable?} We use TikZ as a focused case study that isolates the core difficulties of the problem (weak code structure, fine-grained visual semantics, and difficult feature localization) in a controlled and challenging setting. We define visual code customization as an iterative editing problem with an imperfect oracle, and introduce a framework for analyzing such iterative refinements. We conduct a large-scale study and evaluate multiple LLM-based and tool-augmented visual verifiers within iterative refinement pipelines, and perform extensive manual annotation of refinement trajectories to assess verifier behavior and feedback quality. Our findings show that even imperfect verifiers can determine with moderate accuracy whether visual instructions are applied to code, achieving F1-scores up to 0.815. Feedback improves iterative refinement, especially for weaker models, adding 11–20 perfect customizations for Qwen3-vl-30b-a3b-Instruct, while stronger models like Gemini-3 gain fewer improvements (+5) but benefit more from accurate verification that prevents premature acceptance. Feedback is effective only when it precisely identifies image issues, provides actionable guidance, addresses all relevant problems, and remains grounded in the original instruction.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MB-Loc: Multi-planar Bird's-eye-view Localization in outdoor LiDAR scenes

Global LiDAR localization is a fundamental task for autonomous navigation systems. Recent methods perform Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) and achieve superior accuracy over Absolute Pose Regression (APR) solutions by predicting dense 3D world coordinates. However, SCR approaches introduce two major bottlenecks: severe computational inefficiency from processing raw 3D geometries and significant performance degradation under varying sensor viewpoints. To address these limitations, we present MB-Loc, a lightweight and viewpoint-robust SCR framework. Instead of relying on heavy 3D convolutions, we project the input LiDAR scan into a 2.5D Multi-planar Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation. By slicing the point-cloud along the Z-axis and mapping signed depths into discrete 2D planes, MB-Loc retains essential 3D geometric structures while exploiting the computational tractability of standard 2D CNNs. To handle the inherent sparsity of outdoor LiDAR, we introduce a KL-regularized latent bottleneck that explicitly models spatial uncertainty without injecting stochastic noise. Finally, to ensure rotation robustness, we apply 3D spatial augmentations prior to planar projection, forcing the network to implicitly learn viewpoint-invariant features. We perform extensive experiments on the publicly available NCLT dataset and demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Operating at real-time inference speeds, MB-Loc significantly outperforms traditional 3D-SCR architectures in computational efficiency.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A theoretical model for task routing in mixture-of-expert transformers

arXiv:2606.14398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-experts (MoE) layers enable the scaling of transformer models while keeping the inference compute fixed. While task-expert specialization has been observed in empirical studies of frontier MoE transformer models, existing theoretical work analyzes this using continuous mixture models that cannot be used to model natural language effectively. An important open question is to theoretically explain task-expert specialization in transformer MoE models using discrete models of language. To address this, we represent structured knowledge via syntactic templates and finite key-value dictionaries, and prove formally that a single-layer MoE transformer can encode knowledge by using experts that specialize in the corresponding tasks. Our construction shows how queries are routed to unique, task-specific experts whose size depends solely on the intrinsic complexity of the given task (i.e. the combined size of its syntactic templates and factual dictionary). Our construction provides a theoretical support for empirical results on localized knowledge circuits in MoE models. We support our theoretical findings with experiments evaluating model performance under varying MoE loss functions.

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

RubricsTree: Scalable and Evolving Open-Ended Evaluation of Personal Health Agents across Health Memory and Medical Skills

The LLM-empowered personal health agents with user health (sensor) metrics have offered a promising pathway to alleviate global disparities in healthcare access. However, large-scale clinical deployment remains constrained by an open-ended evaluation bottleneck: physician annotation is reliable but costly and unscalable, while LLM-as-a-judge evaluators are scalable but subjective, inconsistent, and sometimes clinically misaligned. We introduce RubricsTree, a scalable evaluation framework with an expert-aligned hierarchical taxonomy of over 100 atomic, clinically-verifiable Boolean rubrics, evolving from the insights of 4,000 real user queries through an iterative human-in-the-loop curation protocol with an expertise panel led by an experienced physician. A context-aware adaptive router activates only the relevant auto-weighted rubric subset per query, providing the throughput needed for scalable evaluation with expert-aligned quality. Through a systematic meta-evaluation, we show that RubricsTree (i) substantially exceeds a strong large-scale evaluation baseline in expert alignment on challenging open-ended queries; (ii) reliably penalizes contextually degraded responses; and (iii) when used as structured instructions, text feedback, or training rewards for performance optimization, yields up to ~66% relative gains on HealthBench for Gemini, GPT, and Qwen model families. RubricsTree thus provides a scalable, auditable, and evolving evaluation infrastructure required for the continuous optimization of product-level personal healthcare AI.