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) 2026-06-17

Effective Gaussian Management for High-fidelity Object Reconstruction

This paper proposes an effective Gaussian management framework for high-fidelity scene reconstruction of both appearance and geometry. Unlike recent Gaussian Splatting (GS) pipelines that treat all primitives uniformly during optimization, our framework explicitly manages the attribute activation, representation and pruning of Gaussian. Specifically, our framework first introduces GauSep, a novel densification strategy that selectively activates Gaussian color or normal attributes to alleviate destructive gradient conflicts arising from dual supervision. We further propose GauRep, an adaptive Gaussian representation that dynamically adjusts spherical harmonics (SHs) orders and performs task-decoupled pruning to reduce redundancy at both the individual and global levels. To provide reliable geometric supervision for above mangement process, we additionally introduce CoRe, an regularized surface reconstruction module that distills robust normal fields from an SDF branch to the Gaussian representation through a confidence mechanism. Notably, the proposed Gaussian management is compatible with various reconstruction architectures and can be seamlessly integrated to improve performance while reducing size of the model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior or comparable performance in appearance and geometry reconstruction compared with state-of-the-art methods, while using significantly fewer parameters.

02.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-11

Large-scale, spatially resolved panoramic CRISPR screening in native tissue environments using Perturb-DBiT

Authors:

Spatially resolved CRISPR screening in vivo has been limited to small perturbation panels and subsets of protein-coding RNAs. We present Perturb-DBiT, a method for co-sequencing of spatial total RNA whole transcriptomes and single guide RNAs (sgRNAs) on the same tissue section in situ. In a human cancer metastatic colonization model, we applied large (80,000+) sgRNA panels across tumor colonies in multiple consecutive tissue sections alongside their corresponding total RNA transcriptomes. We linked perturbations affecting long noncoding RNA covariation, microRNA–mRNA interactions and distinct amino acid-specific tRNA alterations to tumor migration and growth. By integrating transcriptional pseudotime trajectories, we further observed the impact of perturbations on clonal dynamics and cooperation. In an immune-competent syngeneic mouse model, investigation of the tumor immune microenvironment indicated distinct, synergistic effects on immune infiltration and suppression. Perturb-DBiT provides a spatially resolved comprehensive view of perturbation responses in complex tissues, including small and large RNA regulation, tumor proliferation, migration, metastasis and immune interactions. In vivo CRISPR genetic perturbations are spatially mapped at scale.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Audited Conformal Prediction for Classification under Unknown Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.14909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for a pretrained classification model deployed under unknown distribution shift. We propose Audited Conformal Prediction (ACP), a method that leverages a small labeled dataset from the target population to train an auxiliary audit model identifying inputs where the legacy model is likely to fail. By integrating the audit model's outputs into the conformal prediction framework, ACP produces prediction sets that guarantee marginal coverage while achieving substantially higher conditional coverage in practice than existing approaches. We develop and analyze two complementary integration strategies – one targeting marginal coverage with improved conditional performance, the other providing explicit group-conditional coverage guarantees – and establish theoretical guarantees for both. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method and illustrate trade-offs between prediction set size and conditional coverage.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Restless bandits with imperfect binary feedback: PCL-indexability analysis and computation

arXiv:2606.11192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study restless bandits with binary latent states and imperfect binary feedback, motivated by opportunistic spectrum access with sensing errors. For the associated belief-state model, we develop a partial conservation laws (PCL)-based analytical and computational framework for establishing indexability and evaluating the Whittle index, building on a verification theorem for real-state discounted restless bandits. The framework analyzes the stochastic dynamics via an associated deterministic skeleton, renewal decompositions, and combinatorics on words. It yields tractable expressions for discounted reward and resource metrics in several threshold regimes, enabling full verification of the PCL-indexability conditions there. For the remaining regime, where a complete analytic verification is not achieved in this paper, we derive efficient numerical schemes for computing the relevant marginal metrics and the marginal productivity (MP) index, which equals the Whittle index when those conditions hold. Extensive computational experiments provide strong evidence that these conditions also hold in that regime across broad parameter ranges and without the stringent parameter restrictions imposed in prior work. The experiments further show that theMP index policy typically outperforms standard benchmark policies, often by a substantial margin.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Hyperlipidemia Pharmacotherapy in Skilled Nursing Facilities: A Real-World Evidence Study

Objectives: To estimate hyperlipidemia medication order prevalence and associated variables in U.S. skilled nursing facility (SNF) residents. Design: Retrospective, observational study. Setting and Participants: Electronic Health Record data from 447,080 SNF residents with a hyperlipidemia diagnosis identified in PointClickCare's Life Sciences clinical database (January-April 2025) were reviewed. Methods: The presence and absence of medication orders for hyperlipidemia treatments recommended by the American Heart Association were assessed. Descriptive analyses summarized demographic and clinical characteristics, and a modified Poisson regression model was used to estimate risk ratios for having a medication order, adjusting for demographic, clinical, and facility characteristics. Results: Overall, 83.3% of residents diagnosed with hyperlipidemia had at least one hyperlipidemia medication order. Statins were ordered by 96.2% of active order residents, while other medication classes i.e., omega-3 fatty acids, cholesterol absorption inhibitors, fibrates were less common (

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

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

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.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models

arXiv:2604.03208v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World models are a promising path to zero-shot embodied control through planning. However, existing world model planners struggle on long-horizon, multi-stage tasks: prediction errors compound and naive search is exponential in the planning horizon. Hierarchy mitigates both by decomposing tasks into shorter, tractable subproblems; yet prior hierarchical approaches either amortize control into task-specific policies (hierarchical RL) or assume low-dimensional states and known dynamics (classical hierarchical MPC). We present Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models (HWM), an architecture and planning paradigm for hierarchical model predictive control (MPC) directly on visual world models trained solely via next-latent prediction. HWM learns world models at multiple temporal scales within a shared latent space, so predictions from the long-horizon model serve as subgoals for the short-horizon model via latent matching, without task-specific rewards, skill learning, or hierarchical policies. To keep long-horizon search tractable, HWM learns an action encoder that compresses primitive action chunks into latent macro-actions. On real-world Franka manipulation, HWM solves pick-and-place from a single goal image at 70% success vs. 0% for single-level planning. Across simulated push manipulation and maze navigation, HWM consistently improves performance on long-horizon tasks while requiring up to 3x less planning compute.

08.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-29

Availability, appeal, and addictiveness by design: Tobacco and nicotine industry deliberate targeting of youth

Authors:

by Raglan Maddox, Becky Freeman, Charlotta Pisinger, Emily Banks Contemporary tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed, marketed, and distributed to maximize youth appeal, uptake, dependence, and use. Youth uptake is a predictable outcome of systems designed to maximize product availability, appeal, and addictiveness. In recognition of the World No Tobacco Day 2026 theme, "unmasking the appeal", this Perspective by Raglan Maddox and colleagues discusses how tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed and marketed to maximize youth appeal, and highlight the need for policies to ensure greater industry accountability and to tackle concerning uptake trends.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Anytime-Valid Confirmation of Label-Shift Corrections

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14028v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In small-batch scientific deployments, labeled target outcomes may be too scarce for reliable shift estimation even when unlabeled target inputs are available. We address the complementary setting where the practitioner has a pre-specified label-shift correction from domain knowledge and asks whether incoming labeled outcomes support it. We show that the per-observation likelihood ratio between a label-shift-corrected predictive and the source predictive is a conditional e-value, so its running product is a nonnegative martingale and Ville's inequality yields an anytime-valid confirmation rule. The log martingale equals the cumulative negative log-predictive density (NLPD) gap between the source and the corrected predictive, converting routine model monitoring into a formal sequential test. Rejection means the incoming data support the posited correction relative to the source predictive, but it is not a precise estimate of the degree of shift. Closed forms are available for GP sources with Gaussian label-shift ratios. GP regression simulations validate Type I control, finite-sample power, miscalibration sensitivity, and the small-batch advantage of a reliable prior over label-based re-estimation.

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

SmartFont: Dynamic Condition Allocation for Few-Shot Font Generation

Few-shot font generation simultaneously requires global structural completeness and fine-grained local style fidelity. Existing methods usually either rely on global content-style modeling, which is robust but imperfectly disentangled, or emphasize component/local modeling, which captures fine details but relies heavily on local priors and reference coverage. We argue that the key challenge is not merely to learn purer conditions, but to organize complementary yet biased global and local conditions through multi-level allocation during generation. To this end, we propose SmartFont, a diffusion-based few-shot font generation framework that combines global content-style generation with weakly supervised local corrective experts. The local branch performs semantic-spatial allocation by learning expert-wise local concepts and semantically meaningful spatial maps under weak component supervision, enabling fine-grained correction without requiring explicit component-conditioned inference. On top of this, a denoising-state condition allocation module adaptively weights global content, global style, and local corrective feature across timesteps and injection blocks. Extensive experiments show that SmartFont achieves better global-local balance, improves glyph quality and local detail fidelity.

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

Multipartite reference-frame-independent quantum cryptographic communication

arXiv:2606.12284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reference frame mismatch among communication parties introduces errors in quantum cryptographic protocols. As the number of participants increases, aligning reference frames becomes increasingly difficult, complicating multipartite quantum cryptographic implementations. Here, we theoretically and experimentally investigate multipartite reference-frame-independent (RFI) quantum cryptographic communication using Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states. We generalize the bipartite RFI security parameter $C$ to an $N$-party parameter $C_N$ and derive the asymptotic secret key rate expressed solely in terms of experimentally accessible quantities. We analyze the key rate under global and local depolarizing noise models and find that increasing the number of parties $N$ enhances robustness against global depolarizing noise while increasing vulnerability to local channel noise. We also present a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration of four-party RFI quantum cryptographic communication using four-photon GHZ states, confirming the reference-frame invariance of both the $C_4$ parameter and the secret key rate under various reference frame rotations.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Fidelity bounds for adiabatic gates and other quantum operations with time-dependent dissipation

arXiv:2606.20501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As quantum-computing platforms are susceptible to noise, the fidelity of quantum operations is limited by decoherence. Understanding this limitation is crucial for building utility-scale quantum processors. In previous works [Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 150504 (2022); Quantum 9, 1684 (2025)], we presented analytical formulae for the average gate fidelity of multi-qubit operations under static Markovian noise processes, including operations that temporarily leave the computational subspace. However, some quantum-computing architectures dynamically modulate qubit or coupler frequencies to implement two-qubit gates, e.g., baseband flux gates; such modulation can lead to dissipation rates varying in time. In this Letter, we therefore generalize the fidelity-reduction formulae to encompass time-dependent dissipation. Applying our generalized formula, we obtain a fidelity bound for adiabatic operations and demonstrate that flux-dependent noise sensitivity, combined with qubit-coupler hybridization, significantly reduces the fidelity of adiabatic controlled-Z (CZ) gates in superconducting quantum computers. Our work thus provides essential theoretical tools for evaluating error budgets and optimizing the design of quantum operations in tunable quantum-computing architectures, and may also find applications in quantum-sensing and quantum-communication protocols that are affected by time-dependent dissipation.

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

Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.13026v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interfacing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with democracy is one of the most profound challenges of our times. On the one hand, AI comes with opportunities to overcome long-standing challenges in democracy, such as low participation in deliberative and voting processes with poor representation of people. On the other hand, new risks arise from AI algorithms that are privacy-intrusive, biased, manipulative, spread misinformation and influence election results. Moving beyond the over-simplistic question of whether AI is good or bad for democracy, the Handbook on Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence asks instead: how to upgrade democracies and the principles they are built on, using AI? How to engage with AI and on what terms? Which new values and design principles are required to build democratic resilience? In 34 chapters by 59 authors across the world from different disciplines, we explore how AI can empower collective intelligence for democracy (Part 1) and what is the future of deliberative democracy using large language models and social media (Part 2). We also illustrate the role of AI for building resilient self-governance systems (Part 3) and the challenges of transforming democracy in the age of AI (Part 4). We conclude with broader perspectives (Part 5) that re-imagine the interplay of democracy and AI.

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

Hierarchical mutual distillation for multi-view fusion: Learning from all possible view combinations

Multi-view learning often struggles to effectively leverage images captured from diverse angles and locations. Learning methods for unstructured multi-view images remain largely underexplored. We propose a novel Hierarchical Mutual Distillation for Multi-View Fusion (HMDMV) method, which can handle both structured and unstructured multi-view scenarios. It makes predictions utilizing all possible view combinations: single view, partial multi-view, and full multi-view. The method generates predictions for each view combination and then applies hierarchical mutual distillation to enhance inter-view consistency. An uncertainty-based weighting mechanism further refines the fusion process by adjusting the influence of each view combination according to its prediction confidence, reducing the impact of low-confidence views. Extensive experiments on large-scale structured and unstructured datasets demonstrate that HMDMV consistently achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy. Another unique advantage of HMDMV is that it provides improved flexibility in inference, allowing for more or fewer view counts in inference than those used in training without additional processing. We also provide a light version with reduced training cost by designing an efficient strategy that randomly samples subsets of view combinations during each training iteration. These results highlight HMDMV's robustness in real-world settings where view availability is variable or incomplete. The code is available at https://github.com/labhai/HMDMV.

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Rock weathering can counteract river CO<sub>2</sub> emissions induced by permafrost thaw

Authors:

Climate-induced permafrost thaw unlocks large stores of organic carbon that are mineralized and emitted as carbon dioxide (CO2) from rivers to the atmosphere1. Concurrently, warming and permafrost thaw can increase mineral weathering rates, thus affecting the release and sequestration of inorganic carbon2–4. Yet how these biological and geological carbon cycles interact and jointly affect CO2 dynamics (emission compared with drawdown) in permafrost rivers remains unknown5. Here we combine CO2 emissions, organic and inorganic solute concentrations, dual carbon isotopes (δ13C–Δ14C) and geochemical modelling to infer how permafrost thaw may affect river biogeochemistry over decades to centuries across the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Leveraging a gradient of thermal permafrost degradation, we find that river CO2 emissions decline, whereas solute fluxes from rock weathering increase with decreasing permafrost cover. Across this region, net CO2 drawdown fluxes from rock weathering are about 35% of river CO2 emissions, varying from around 15% in catchments with continuous permafrost to more than 100% in catchments with discontinuous or isolated permafrost. Thus, carbon fluxes from chemical weathering may become increasingly important with ongoing permafrost thaw, potentially even outpacing river CO2 emissions. Our findings disentangle the interplay between biological and geological carbon fluxes that are important for the cryosphere and the global carbon cycle. Permafrost thaw on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau increases rock-weathering rates while reducing river CO2 emissions, suggesting geological carbon fluxes may eventually outpace thaw-driven emissions.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

R1-SyntheticVL: Is Synthetic Data from Generative Models Ready for Multimodal Large Language Model?

In this work, we aim to develop effective data synthesis techniques that autonomously synthesize multimodal training data for enhancing MLLMs in solving complex real-world tasks. To this end, we propose Collective Adversarial Data Synthesis (CADS), a novel and general approach to synthesize high-quality, diverse and challenging multimodal data for MLLMs. The core idea of CADS is to leverage collective intelligence to ensure high-quality and diverse generation, while exploring adversarial learning to synthesize challenging samples for effectively driving model improvement. Specifically, CADS operates with two cyclic phases, i.e., Collective Adversarial Data Generation (CAD-Generate) and Collective Adversarial Data Judgment (CAD-Judge). CAD-Generate leverages collective knowledge to jointly generate new and diverse multimodal data, while CAD-Judge collaboratively assesses the quality of synthesized data. In addition, CADS introduces an Adversarial Context Optimization mechanism to optimize the generation context to encourage challenging and high-value data generation. With CADS, we construct MMSynthetic-20K and train our model R1-SyntheticVL, which demonstrates superior performance on various benchmarks.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Otto engine powered by an anisotropic Heisenberg XYZ model under independent local magnetic fields

arXiv:2606.12877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a quantum Otto heat engine whose working substance is an anisotropic two-qubit Heisenberg XYZ model. Independent local magnetic fields are used to control each spin individually. The influence of the longitudinal coupling, anisotropy, transverse coupling, and local fields on the net work output and efficiency is systematically examined. Reducing the longitudinal coupling is found to markedly improve both the maximum work and the peak efficiency. The engine performance reaches an optimum at a particular value of the anisotropy parameter. A local work analysis clarifies how work is produced during the cycle. Because of the asymmetric local fields and the intrinsic spin-spin interaction, the two qubits play markedly different thermodynamic roles; the interaction term itself contributes crucially to the total work. We further analyze the variation of quantum entanglement, quantified by concurrence, along the cycle. The results indicate that a pronounced change in entanglement between the hot and cold isomagnetic strokes is closely correlated with the efficiency enhancement. This work offers new insight into the operating principles and control of quantum Otto heat engines.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Effective discrete-modulated continuous variable QKD under general attacks

arXiv:2606.20346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous variable quantum key distribution via discrete modulations ensures information-theoretic security using standard telecom technologies, providing affordable and scalable quantum communications with simplified classical postprocessing. However, existing security proofs against general attacks often rely on restrictive assumptions, such as a bounded dimension for coherent states, or require impractically large block sizes. In this work, we develop a finite-size security analysis that removes these limitations while incorporating realistic experimental features. Our approach combines the dimension reduction technique, a security proof based on the marginal-constrained entropy accumulation, and a trusted detector model accounting for the receiver imperfections. We report positive key rates in the finite-size regime for relevant block sizes of the order of $10^8$. These results contribute to narrowing the gap between theoretical security proofs and practical implementations of discrete-modulated continuous variable quantum key distribution protocols.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Physiological Aging of the Respiratory System (PARS): from development to application

Background: Aging has a critical role in lung changes and the outcome of lung disease. Several lung aging equations have been proposed to measure deviation from physiological aging of the respiratory system. In this study, we aimed to develop a single measure of accelerated lung aging and show its application as a measure of lung aging. Method: We used a pre-bronchodilator pulmonary function test (PFT) from NHANES adult participants recruited from 2007 to 2011. We applied Klemera-Dubal Method (KDM) to four PFT measurements, FEV1, FVC, FEF25-75, and PEF, to calculate a measure of lung biological aging. Physiological Aging of the Respiratory System (PARS) was calculated from the residual method vs. chronological age. We tested the construct validity of PARS by measuring its association with risk factors of lung health. The prognostic validity was measured using a survival analysis. Sampling weights were applied to all analyses. Results: In 14,123 adult participants, the mean (SD) of accelerated lung age (PARS) was 0 (8.2) years. Participants with a history of asthma and emphysema had 4- and 10-year higher PARS. Cigarette smoking, lower socioeconomic status, black race, higher serum cadmium, and lower serum selenium and magnesium were associated with higher PARS. During 116 months of follow-up, PARS was associated with a higher mortality (HR = 1.06, 95%CI: 1.05-1.07 per year). Females with higher PARS had a higher risk of death (P for interaction < 0.001). Results were consistent across different subgroups and sensitivity analyses. Conclusion: PARS is a noninvasive lung aging marker and can be applied as a single measure of lung accelerated aging in the adult population. Its strong construct and predictive validity support its future application among different populations with and without lung disease.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Global Geometry Is Not Enough for Vision Representations

A common assumption in representation learning is that globally well-distributed embeddings support robust and generalizable representations. This focus has shaped both training objectives and evaluation protocols, implicitly treating global geometry as a proxy for representational competence. While global geometry effectively encodes which elements are present, it is often insensitive to how they are composed. We investigate this limitation by testing the ability of geometric metrics to predict compositional binding across a diverse suite of vision encoders. We find that standard geometry-based statistics exhibit near-zero correlation with compositional binding. In contrast, functional sensitivity, as measured by the input–output Jacobian, reliably tracks this capability. We further provide an analytic account showing that this disparity arises from objective design, as existing losses explicitly constrain embedding geometry but leave the local input–output mapping unconstrained. These results suggest that global embedding geometry captures only a partial view of representational competence and establish functional sensitivity as a critical complementary axis for modeling composite structure.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Improved Amenability Bounds for Local Coordination Games

arXiv:2606.01963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study local pure coordination games on finite social networks, continuing the framework of Hutchcroft, Rospuskova, and Tamuz. They showed that low inefficiency in local coordination forces the underlying graph to be amenable, with a square-root loss in the amenability parameter. We improve this loss in the binary unbiased setting. Using Shapley values of a mutual-information game associated with the players' local outputs, we prove that if the average disagreement is at most $\varepsilon$, then the graph is $(O(\varepsilon\log(1/\varepsilon)),r)$-amenable. This gives a sharper quantitative converse between local coordination and graph amenability.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Position: AI Must Become Planet-Centered, Not Just Human-Centered

arXiv:2606.13704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This position paper argues that contemporary AI paradigms are insufficient for supporting complex global goals and introduces Planet-Centered AI (PCAI) as a design philosophy and research agenda that reorients AI toward planetary-scale socio-ecological systems and their long-term trajectories. A planet-centered approach is grounded in systems thinking, treating Earth as an interconnected whole of which humans are part. We diagnose recurring limitations across AI frameworks, many of which remain human-centered, and show why these become especially consequential under current planetary conditions characterized by systemic risk, non-stationarity, and deep uncertainty. We then articulate how PCAI reshapes the AI lifecycle, from problem formulation and model design to evaluation and deployment, by emphasizing alignment with global agendas, developing system-aware AI foundations, trajectory-oriented evaluation, and monitorability. Finally, we advance a falsifiable claim: AI systems optimized without explicit consideration of systemic consequences are more likely to exacerbate systemic instability than to mitigate it.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Systematic Evaluation of Novel View Synthesis for Video Place Recognition

The generation of synthetic novel views has the potential to positively impact robot navigation in several ways. In image-based navigation, a novel overhead view generated from a scene taken by a ground robot could be used to guide an aerial robot to that location. In Video Place Recognition (VPR), novel views of ground locations from the air can be added that enable a UAV to identify places seen by the ground robot, and similarly, overhead views can be used to generate novel ground views. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of synthetic novel views in VPR using five public VPR image databases and seven typical image similarity methods. We show that for small synthetic additions, novel views improve VPR recognition statistics. We find that for larger additions, the magnitude of viewpoint change is less important than the number of views added and the type of imagery in the dataset.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLM-as-Judge in Education: A Curriculum-Grounded Marking Pipeline

arXiv:2606.17507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to question generation and automated assessment. However, deploying LLMs in preparation for high-stakes exams requires more than prompt engineering; it demands software pipelines that systematically ground model outputs in authorised curriculum artefacts and marking guidelines issued by education authorities. This paper presents a curriculum-grounded, configurable LLM-as-Judge pipeline for question-level marking, co-developed with an industrial partner, to support exam preparation for university admission. The pipeline identifies the relevant topics, subtopics, and cognitive demand of a question, and assembles verifiable and authorised context to support LLM judgement. Curriculum intent is operationalised through concrete syllabus artefacts, including prescribed verbs and outcomes, performance band descriptors, glossary definitions, and marking-guideline principles. A staged LLM workflow is employed to first generate question-specific rubrics, capturing structured expectations of performance, and then derive and evaluate marking criteria used to allocate marks to student responses. This design improves consistency, transparency, and alignment with official marking practices. Preliminary evaluation shows that the proposed LLM-as-Judge pipeline delivers marking outcomes comparable to human tutors, while yielding justifications that are more traceable to authorised curriculum artefacts and marking standards. The pipeline has also been integrated into an online study platform, where early deployment data provide initial insights into operational usage and manual overrides.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Evolution of Conditional Entropy for Diffusion Dynamics on Graphs

arXiv:2510.19441v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The modeling of diffusion processes on graphs is the basis for many network science and machine learning approaches. Entropic measures of network-based diffusion have recently been employed to investigate the reversibility of these processes and the diversity of the modeled systems. While results about their steady state are well-known, very few exact results about their finite-time evolution exist. Here, we introduce the conditional entropy of heat diffusion in graphs, and outline a mathematical framework that contextualizes diffusion and conditional entropy within the theories of continuous-time Markov chains and information theory. In particular, we highlight that this entropic measure satisfies an information-theoretical version of the second law of thermodynamics, thereby providing a parallelism between diffusion dynamics on networks and their physical counterparts. Furthermore, we obtain explicit results for its evolution on complete, path, and circulant graphs, as well as a mean-field approximation for Erdös-Rényi graphs. We also obtain asymptotic results for general networks and provide bounds for the evolution of conditional entropy. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate several properties of conditional entropy for diffusion over random graphs, such as the Watts-Strogatz model.