中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Refusal Beyond a Single Direction: A Preliminary Comparison of Diff-in-Means and INLP

Authors:
Elisabetta Rocchetti↗Alfio Ferrara↗

arXiv:2606.13720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arditi et al. (2024) has shown that refusal in safety fine-tuned chat models is mediated by a single linear direction in the residual stream, recoverable by a difference-in-means (DiM) of harmful and harmless activations. We compare DiM-based interventions (activation addition and directional ablation) with two interventions derived from Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP) – nullspace projection and counterfactual flipping – on five open-weight chat models, asking whether INLP can match DiM at steering refusal and whether its richer parameterisation yields more tweakable interventions. INLP counterfactual flipping is competitive with DiM directional ablation on refusal suppression, while nullspace projection is consistently weaker. Restricting INLP to the leading directions of the extracted subspace preserves most of the suppression effect at near-baseline perplexity, giving a tunable capability. Geometrically, the two INLP interventions land in qualitatively different regions of activation space: nullspace projection collapses transformed activations between the harmful and harmless clusters, while counterfactual flipping moves them into the opposite cluster, suggesting that the model encodes the absence of a concept differently from its opposite – an intriguing distinction that warrants further investigation in future work.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Multidimensional motivation in aging: a person-centred framework spanning goal-directed behaviour, social reward and pleasure

Authors:
Warren↗S. L↗Somasundaram↗Horne↗Robinson↗G. A↗Behenska↗Nguyen↗Goh↗A. M. Y↗Jeon↗Y.-H↗…

Motivational changes are determinants of healthy aging, social engagement, and functional independence, and may signal early neurodegenerative risk. Existing assessment approaches in aging typically treat motivation as a unitary construct. Here, we introduce MotDem, an age-appropriate measure of motivation co-designed with people living with dementia, carers, and clinicians. Across a broad adult lifespan sample (18-80 years), MotDem revealed a robust three-domain motivational architecture encompassing goal-directed behaviour, social reward, and pleasure, with a fourth satiety factor retained as exploratory. This structure was replicated in an independent older cohort (45-80 years) from a different national context. MotDem showed strong convergence with established measures of apathy and anhedonia, alongside more modest associations with depressive symptomatology. Together, these findings show that motivational aging is multifaceted and poorly captured by traditional unitary assessment. MotDem provides a multidimensional framework for measuring distinct motivational drivers of heterogeneous aging trajectories, with implications for resilience, wellbeing, and neurodegenerative risk.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Generalized Kerr-Cat Qubit Codes

Authors:
Alonso Viladomat↗Shahram Dehdashti↗Amin Kargarian↗Janis N\"otzel↗Peter van Loock↗

arXiv:2606.14901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic study of Schrödinger cat codes constructed from Kerr-type coherent states, including displaced Kerr coherent states and Barut–Girardello Kerr coherent states, each admitting two distinct families determined by the sign of the Kerr nonlinearity. By tuning the Kerr parameter and coherent-state amplitude, these states interpolate between $\mathfrak{su}(2)$, $\mathfrak{su}(1,1)$ coherent states, providing a unified and versatile foundation for this type of bosonic quantum error correction. Unlike standard two-component Schrödinger cat codes, where a single photon-loss event induces an uncorrectable bit-flip, the nonlinear phase-space structure of Kerr cat states enables simultaneous detection and correction of both photon-loss and dephasing errors within a unified recovery framework, with optimal recovery operations determined via convex optimization. We demonstrate that Kerr cat encodings significantly outperform conventional cat codes under combined loss and dephasing noise, and that judicious parameter optimization can suppress both error channels to a level that reduces the overhead of additional error correction layers. We further show that Kerr-deformed coherent-state manifolds under engineered two-photon driving emerge as effective steady states of driven-dissipative dynamics, with single-photon decoherence strongly suppressed and leakage outside the protected manifold appearing only as higher-order corrections in the deformation strength. Our extended formalism identifies generalized Kerr Schrödinger cat codes as promising candidates for fault-tolerant bosonic quantum computation in experimental platforms such as nonlinear photonics.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The embrace of open science: An analysis of a decade of AI research and 56 800 conference papers

Authors:
Kevin L Coakley↗Thijs Snelleman↗Holger Hoos↗Odd Erik Gundersen↗

arXiv:2606.16974v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The reproducibility crisis has directed the AI research community toward improving documentation practices. Several studies have identified methodological issues, and in response, the most impactful venues in the field have introduced reproducibility checklists. We seek to understand whether documentation practices have changed over time by assessing all published papers at five leading AI conferences over the past decade. Seven reproducibility variables were identified, quality-assured and used to analyse 56 800 publications. Our analysis reveals that in the period 2014 to 2024, documentation practices have improved; papers sharing both code and data increased nearly sixfold, from 11% to 64% Building on empirical reproducibility rates from a prior study, we estimate - inferred from documentation practices, not direct testing - that reproducibility increased from 28% in 2014 to 64% in 2024. Improvements in documentation practices predate the introduction of reproducibility checklists, suggesting these changes reflect a broader movement toward open science rather than a direct response to formal requirements.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

What Does the Brain See? Multiview Neural Representations to Demystify the Brain-Visual Alignment

Authors:
Salini Yadav↗Taveena Lotey↗Pravendra Singh↗Partha Pratim Roy↗

Zero-shot visual decoding from electroencephalography (EEG) aims to infer visual semantics from non-invasive neural recordings, but remains challenging due to the low signal-to-noise ratio, non-stationarity, and limited spatial resolution of EEG. Existing EEG-vision alignment methods often rely on holistic EEG embeddings, which can obscure the complementary temporal, spectral, and spatial structure underlying visual perception. We introduce a unified multiview EEG representation learning framework for aligning brain responses with visual semantic embeddings. Our method builds an EEG encoder that jointly models three complementary views: input-conditioned state-space temporal dynamics, learnable wavelet-based spectral decomposition for sample-adaptive frequency modeling, and attention-modulated graph learning for structured electrode interactions. The resulting multiview EEG embeddings are fused and aligned with pretrained visual representations in a shared semantic space using contrastive learning with EEG-specific regularization, enabling 200-way zero-shot visual classification. Experiments on THINGS-EEG benchmark show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with 54.8% Top-1 and 85.6% Top-5 accuracy in the within-subject setting and 15.3% Top-1 and 45.4% Top-5 accuracy in the cross-subject setting. We further present the first systematic cross-session EEG-image decoding evaluation, achieving 40.8% Top-1 and 78.0% Top-5 accuracy. These results suggest that explicitly modeling multiview neural structure improves both semantic alignment and generalization in EEG-based visual decoding.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Ensemble Feature Selection and Harris Hawks Optimization for Explainable Mental Health Risk Prediction in Female Sex Workers

Authors:
Ahnaf Atef Choudhury↗Md. Parvej Hoque Palash↗Shahriar Siddique Ayon↗Ramkrishna Saha↗Abdullah Al Mamun↗

arXiv:2606.24047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One of the significant mental health issues affecting female sex workers (FSWs) is mental disorders, especially depression. Exposure to violence, stigma, and economic hardship further increases their psychological risk. Current machine learning (ML) models are typically ineffective at capturing the high-dimensional and complex risk patterns that exist in this marginalized group. This paper suggests a hybrid predictive model that merges an ensemble feature selection strategy using ANOVA and mutual information and Harris Hawks optimization-tuned logistic regression and represents a new application of swarm intelligence to predict mental health in vulnerable groups. The explainable AI (XAI) methods can be used to understand the factors of trauma associated with model predictions. When applied to a group of 3,005 FSWs, it can be seen that the proposed model is more effective than traditional classifiers, with an accuracy of 95.78%, an F1 score of 95.77%, and an AUC of 0.96, and identifying post-traumatic stress, client-related violence, and occupational factors as major contributors to depression. This work bridges the gaps between conventional and ML approaches to develop an XAI tool that enables vulnerable groups to receive early assistance, evidence-based targeted psychosocial care, and health planning.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

ProductConsistency: Improving Product Identity Preservation in Instruction-Based Image Editing via SFT and RL

Authors:
Mukund Khanna↗Raj Singh Yadav↗Kunal Singh↗

Recent advances in instruction-based image editing have enabled models to perform complex visual edits from natural language instructions. However, in product-centric scenarios where preserving product features, branding, and textual elements are critical, current open and closed source models often struggle to maintain this fine-grained object identity. This issue is further compounded by the lack of datasets for instruction-based product image editing with text fidelity constraints, leaving it largely treated as an implicit capability of instruction-based image editing models. In this work, we introduce the ProductConsistency dataset which is designed to improve product-centric image editing. Our approach includes a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset of 87k samples for product editing, a reinforcement learning (RL) dataset with 869 unique product images, and a new benchmark dataset, the ProductConsistency Benchmark, to allow rigorous and standardized evaluation of editing models. To guide RL training, we propose a Cyclic Consistency reward that enforces semantic preservation of product identity by using caption similarity between the original product description and captions generated from the edited image. We fine-tune both Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and Flux.1-Kontext-dev using our dataset and demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline models in OCR and Perceptual metrics, and MLLM-based evaluations as well, indicating stronger product consistency, text rendering, and overall visual quality; with the Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 model achieving a 5x reduction in the character error rate. The code and pipeline is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProductConsistency-6FCC/README.md

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Dissecting model behavior through agent trajectories

Authors:
Gaurav Gupta↗Vatshank Chaturvedi↗Jun Huan↗Anoop Deoras↗

arXiv:2606.17454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance is not just a modeling problem, it is fundamentally a systems problem. The advanced capabilities of models are realized through agent harnesses. Therefore, a gap between model assumptions and harness behavior can easily prevent the model's full capabilities from translating into agent performance. We formalize this as the `intent-execution' gap: the mismatch between what the model intends and what the harness executes, and vice versa. We argue that minimizing this intent-execution gap is as important as other aspects of harness design such as tools and execution loops. To illustrate the impact of this harness-model alignment, we develop a simple and customizable harness called `Simple Strands Agent' (SSA). SSA aims to find the bulk of common patterns which generalize across different model families (such as Claude, Gemini, GPT, Grok, Qwen), as well as a small number of model-specific preferences. We make two contributions: (i) we $reproduce or improve on the pass@1$ performance reported by diverse model-provider families on popular agentic benchmarks (SWE-Pro, SWE-Verified and Terminal-Bench-2), and (ii) building on an $analysis of 138k trajectories generated by SSA$, we look beyond the $\texttt{pass@1}$ numbers which tend to be relatively even across frontier models. By representing agent trajectories in code state-spaces, we observe model-level differences in problem-solving behavior. Finer-grained metrics such as edit frequency, testing activity, and phase-transitions reveal how individual models allocate effort across different stages of autonomous problem solving.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

TSegAgent: Zero-Shot Tooth Segmentation via Geometry-Aware Vision-Language Agents

Authors:
Shaojie Zhuang↗Lu Yin↗Guangshun Wei↗Yunpeng Li↗Xilu Wang↗Yuanfeng Zhou↗

Automatic tooth segmentation and identification from intra-oral scanned 3D models are fundamental problems in digital dentistry, yet most existing approaches rely on task-specific 3D neural networks trained with densely annotated datasets, resulting in high annotation cost and limited generalization to scans from unseen sources. Thus, we propose TSegAgent, which addresses these challenges by reformulating dental analysis as a zero-shot geometric reasoning problem rather than a purely data-driven recognition task. The key idea is to combine the representational capacity of general-purpose foundation models with explicit geometric inductive biases derived from dental anatomy. Instead of learning dental-specific features, the proposed framework leverages multi-view visual abstraction and geometry-grounded reasoning to infer tooth instances and identities without task-specific training. By explicitly encoding structural constraints such as dental arch organization and volumetric relationships, the method reduces uncertainty in ambiguous cases and mitigates overfitting to particular shape distributions. Experimental results demonstrate that this reasoning-oriented formulation enables accurate and reliable tooth segmentation and identification with low computational and annotation cost, while exhibiting strong generalization across diverse and previously unseen dental scans.

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

Pretrained self-supervised speech models can recognize unseen consonants

Authors:
Chihiro Taguchi↗\'Eric Le Ferrand↗Hirosi Nakagawa↗Hitomi Ono↗Kanji Kato↗Emily Prud'hommeaux↗David Chiang↗

Modern pretrained self-supervised automatic speech recognition models are trained on large-scale audio data to encode speech into contextualized representations. However, their training data are heavily skewed toward high-resource languages with little data from low-resource languages, raising concerns about the potential underrepresentation of typologically uncommon speech sounds such as click consonants primarily found in Khoisan languages. This leads to our central research question: Can these models recognize click consonants as accurately as other speech sounds? To address this question, we fine-tune and compare pretrained self-supervised speech models (Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT) on data from two click-rich Khoisan languages (G|ui and West !Xoon). Our results reveal that the fine-tuned models consistently recognize clicks more accurately than non-clicks, suggesting that self-supervision enables generalization across human speech sounds including rare phonemes.

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

Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting (MoFore) for Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning

Authors:
Qinwu Xu↗

Self-supervised video representation learning has recently advanced through contrastive learning, masked reconstruction, and predictive representation learning. Reconstruction-based approaches such as MAE and VideoMAE learn representations by recovering masked visual content [he2022mae,tong2022videomae], while contrastive methods such as CLIP learn semantically meaningful embedding spaces through representation alignment [radford2021clip]. In this work, we introduce a Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting framework (MoFore) for self-supervised video representation learning. Instead of optimizing for pixel-level reconstruction or task-specific semantic alignment, the proposed method learns temporally predictive video representations by forecasting future latent embeddings from temporally distant context clips. To improve robustness across temporal scales, we further introduce randomized temporal-gap forecasting during training. The framework combines predictive latent forecasting with contrastive regularization to encourage temporal consistency while preventing representation collapse. Experiments on the UCF101 dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework learns temporally consistent and semantically meaningful video representations without using action labels during training. Quantitative analysis shows strong temporal stability and emergent category-level structure in the learned embedding space, while qualitative retrieval experiments reveal motion-aware organization across related activities. Overall, the results suggest that long-range latent forecasting provides an effective and computationally efficient approach for self-supervised video representation learning without relying on reconstruction-based objectives.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Architecture-Aware Reinforcement Learning Makes Sliding-Window Attention Competitive in Math Reasoning

Authors:
Kai Liu↗Peijie Dong↗Xinchen Xie↗Jianfei Gao↗Qipeng Guo↗Xiaowen Chu↗Shaoting Zhang↗Kai Chen↗

arXiv:2606.11634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid progress of reasoning and agentic large language models (LLMs) has increased the demand for long-context inference, but self-attention (SA) scales quadratically with context length. To address this, we study SWARR (Sliding-Window Attention with Reinforced Adaptation for Math Reasoning), a practical recipe for adapting SWA models to mathematical reasoning. SWARR has two stages: (1) efficient conversion from a pretrained SA model to SWA with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which avoids pretraining a new base model, and (2) policy adaptation with reinforcement learning (RL). We find that SWA still underperforms SA after SFT, and we hypothesize that this gap is caused in part by a data-architecture mismatch: most SFT data are prepared for SA models and may contain long-range dependencies that are difficult for SWA to model. Because on-policy RL optimizes self-generated trajectories under the SWA constraint, it can adapt trajectories to better match SWA. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that this recipe substantially narrows the gap between SWA and SA, recovering much of the accuracy lost during SWA conversion while preserving the efficiency benefits of linear-complexity attention. Our central contribution is the empirical finding that RL changes the conclusion one would draw from conversion and SFT alone about SWA's viability for math reasoning.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Uniform-in-time error estimates for McKean-Vlasov SDEs with common noise and stochastic algorithms

Authors:
Yuhang Zhang↗Minghui Song↗

arXiv:2606.14170v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, by construct an asymptotic coupling by reflection, we first explore the uniform-in-time estimate on probability distance for two measure-valued processes induced by a McKean-Vlasov SDE with common noise and an interacting particle system, where the drift terms are dissipative merely in the long distance. As direct applications of this estimate, we establish the uniform-in-time error estimates for the numerical solutions derived via backward/tamed/adaptive Euler-Maruyama methods. Moreover, as another direct application, the uniform-in-time conditional propagation of chaos is quantified.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Information-Theoretic Decomposition for Multimodal Interaction Learning

Authors:
Zequn Yang↗Yake Wei↗Haotian Ni↗Zhihao Xu↗Di Hu↗

Multimodal learning hinges on capturing redundant, unique, and synergistic information across modalities, which collectively constitute multimodal interactions. A critical yet underexplored challenge is that these implicit interactions vary dynamically across samples. In this work, we present the first systematic, information-theoretic analysis highlighting why learning these dynamic, sample-specific interactions is critical for effective multimodal learning. Our analysis further reveals deficits in conventional paradigms at learning these distinct interaction types: modality ensemble approaches struggle to capture synergy, while joint learning paradigms often under-utilize redundant information. This highlights the need for an approach that can adaptively learn from different interaction types on a per-sample basis. To this end, we propose Decomposition-based Multimodal Interaction Learning (DMIL), a novel paradigm that explicitly models and learns from sample-specific interactions. First, we design a variational decomposition architecture to isolate the constituent interaction components. Second, we employ a new learning strategy that leverages these explicit interaction components in a fine-tuning process to achieve comprehensive interaction learning. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks and architectures demonstrate that DMIL consistently achieves superior performance by adapting to holistic sample-specific interactions. Our framework is flexible and broadly applicable, establishing an interaction-centric paradigm for multimodal learning. The code is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/DMIL.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Diagnosing and Mitigating Compounding Failures in Agentic Persuasion via Taxonomic Strategy Retrieval

Authors:
Pradyumna Narayana↗Sana Ayromlou↗Purvi Sehgal↗

Foundation-model agents in multi-step, open-ended environments frequently suffer from compounding errors, where early mistakes contaminate long-horizon trajectories. While Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) succeeds in deterministic domains, agents in subjective tasks like persuasion experience severe problem drift and sycophantic conformity. We identify semantic leakage in standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) as a reproducible trigger for these failures, as standard RAG prioritizes vocabulary overlap over logical necessity. To eliminate this leakage, we introduce Taxonomic Strategy RAG (TS-RAG), a systems intervention that routes strategies through a discrete categorical bottleneck to decouple argumentative structure from topical content. Zero-shot, cross-domain evaluations demonstrate that TS-RAG significantly improves the transfer of abstract logic where standard semantic retrieval collapses. Crucially, TS-RAG acts as a "capability bridge" in asymmetric deployments, empowering lightweight persuaders to consistently defeat parametrically superior opponents (improving win rates from 70.5 to 78.5) and accelerating argumentative efficiency. Finally, we introduce trace-level diagnostics via a turn-by-turn Debate State Representation (DSR), demonstrating the necessity of strict constraints to prevent evaluation collapse via default agentic sycophancy.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Fourier analysis of quantum neural network with non-linear data embedding

Authors:
Haiyue Kang↗Martin Sevior↗Muhammad Usman↗

arXiv:2606.14206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fourier analysis has become a crucial tool for understanding the expressivity of Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC) models, as well as an important indicator of barren plateaus (BP). While existing literature has only studied angle-embedded VQCs in a noiseless environment, here we develop the Fourier analysis of VQCs with non-linear data embedding, with particular focus on amplitude embedding, which provides a naturally compact encoding scheme. We first investigate a subtle difference in the domain of input features within amplitude embedding that leads to a distinct expressivity of the zero-frequency Fourier coefficient. By assuming that the ensemble of unitaries generated from the parameter space forms at least a 2-design with respect to the unitary group, we derive, via Weingarten calculus, that the mean of the Fourier coefficients is concentrated at zero, and the variance scales at an exponentially decaying order with respect to the multi-dimensional frequency magnitude. When a noise channel with unitary Kraus operators and probabilities $\{p_k\}$ is taken into account, the variance is further suppressed by a factor $\left(\sum_k p_k^2\right)^{Q}

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

RCEM: Robust Conversational Search EMbedder in Distributional Shift

Authors:
Kilho Son↗Paul Hsu↗Cha Zhang↗Dinei Florencio↗

We propose RCEM, a Robust Conversational search EMbedder that is additionally equipped with LLM's query reformulation capability without losing base model's generalization. Unlike prior conversational dense retrieval approaches that learn direct conversation-to-passage matching, RCEM aligns conversations, prepended by special token, to LLM-rewritten queries, while preserving the original embedding space. The unchanged embedding space automatically maps the rewritten-query to the relevant passages. As a result, RCEM (1) reduces overfitting by simplifying the alignment task from long passages to shorter rewritten queries, (2) eliminates the need for conversation-to-passage relevance labels for training, and (3) maintains its original embedding space that allows conversational queries against indexes built by original embedder without rebuilding them. Extensive experiments show that RCEM consistently outperforms prior approaches, achieving up to 30% improvement under distributional shift.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Near-Optimal Stochastic Linear Bandits with Delay

Authors:
Ofir Schlisselberg↗Mengxiao Zhang↗Yishay Mansour↗

arXiv:2606.16656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study stochastic linear bandits with delayed feedback under several delay models and establish near-optimal regret guarantees. Our results identify when delayed linear bandits exhibit the same qualitative behavior as multi-armed bandits (MAB), and when the linear structure creates fundamentally new challenges. Specifically, (1) for loss-independent delays, where the delay does not depend on the realized loss (but potentially depends on the arm), we show that delays incur only an additive regret penalty. Under stochastic delays, this penalty scales with the expected delay, while under adversarial delays, it scales with the maximum number of outstanding observations. Notably, both delay penalties are dimension-free, improving upon the state-of-the-art results; (2) for loss-dependent delays, we show that linear bandits are substantially harder than MAB: unlike in MAB, we prove matching (up to log factors) upper and lower bounds in linear bandits, whose delay penalty depends on the square root of the dimension. (3) for the delay-as-payoff model, a special case of loss-dependent delay, we show that the optimal MAB guarantee, which depends only on the delay of the optimal arm, is also unattainable in linear bandits. Together, these results provide a sharp characterization of how delayed feedback interacts with linear generalization.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Nonlocal Bayesian Modeling of Continuous Spatio-Temporal Dynamics

Authors:
Jaeyeong Lee↗Heeyoung Kim↗

arXiv:2606.14313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world spatio-temporal forecasting must handle irregular time points, spatially sparse observations, and the need for uncertainty quantification. This setting is often further compounded by nonlocal interactions (long-range spatial coupling). Modeling continuous-space, continuous-time nonlocal dynamics naturally leads to infinite-dimensional integro-differential equations (IDEs), making principled Bayesian inference intractable. We propose the NonLocal Bayesian Spatio-Temporal model (NLBST), a hierarchical Bayesian framework for continuous spatio-temporal fields that learns explicit nonlocal coupling while retaining tractable inference. NLBST represents the latent field via a coordinate-based spatial basis expansion and models the coefficient process with a continuous-time ODE whose learnable linear operator corresponds to a Galerkin reduction of a nonlocal IDE; a Neural ODE residual captures additional nonlinear dynamics. A linear-Gaussian observation model enables Kalman-style sequential updates under missing and irregular observations, while the spatial basis representation enables inductive prediction at unmeasured locations without retraining. Global parameters are learned via variational inference, and uncertainty is handled through a Bayesian hierarchy. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate strong forecasting and spatial generalization with well-calibrated uncertainty, yielding substantial gains over baselines in strongly nonlocal and partially observed regimes.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Compositional Reasoning Depth Predicts Clinical AI Failure: Empirical Evidence Consistent with Transformer Compositionality Limits in Electronic Health Record Question Answering

Authors:
Sanjay Basu↗

Aggregate accuracy benchmarks conceal a systematic structure in how large language models fail at electronic health record (EHR) question answering: questions requiring more inferential steps produce disproportionately more errors. Motivated by theoretical results on transformer compositionality limits, we introduce a pre-specified hop-count taxonomy – the number of distinct reasoning steps required to answer a clinical question from an EHR – as a principled predictor of model failure. We annotate 313 clinician-generated MedAlign EHR question-answer pairs across four hop levels and evaluate 301 questions in a within-model ablation (claude-sonnet-4-6, zero-shot vs. extended thinking) and cross-architecture replications (gpt-4o and gpt-5.4-2026-03-05, zero-shot). All three models, spanning two providers and two OpenAI generations (GPT-4 and GPT-5), show monotone accuracy decline with hop count: Claude Sonnet zero-shot falls from 30.6% (hop=1) to 17.6% (hop=4) (Cochran-Armitage z=-2.30, p=0.011; OR per hop 0.72, 95% CI [0.56,0.92], p=0.008); GPT-4o replicates this (37.8% to 14.7%; OR 0.58 [0.45,0.75], p

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Europe as science superpower: what it will take to rival the US and China

Authors:
Elizabeth Gibney↗

Amid chaos in US science and geopolitical turmoil, Europe wants to position itself as a research haven — but questions about funding and innovation remain. Amid chaos in US science and geopolitical turmoil, Europe wants to position itself as a research haven — but questions about funding and innovation remain.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

The Implicit Bias of Steepest Descent with Mini-batch Stochastic Gradient

Authors:
Jichu Li↗Xuan Tang↗Difan Zou↗

arXiv:2602.11557v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A variety of widely used optimization methods like SignSGD and Muon can be interpreted as instances of steepest descent under different norm-induced geometries. In this work, we study the implicit bias of mini-batch stochastic steepest descent in multi-class classification, characterizing how batch size, momentum, and variance reduction shape the limiting max-margin behavior and convergence rates under general entry-wise and Schatten-$p$ norms. We show that, without momentum, worst-case convergence and successful classification can only be guaranteed with full-batch gradient. In contrast, momentum enables small-batch convergence to an approximate max-margin solution through a batch-momentum trade-off, though it slows convergence. This approach provides fully explicit, dimension-free rates that improve upon prior results. Moreover, we prove that variance reduction can recover the exact full-batch implicit bias for any batch size, albeit at a slower convergence rate. Finally, we further investigate the batch-size-one steepest descent without momentum, and reveal its convergence to a fundamentally different bias via a concrete data example, which reveals a key limitation of purely stochastic updates. Overall, our unified analysis clarifies when stochastic optimization aligns with full-batch behavior, and paves the way for perform deeper explorations of the training behavior of stochastic gradient steepest descent algorithms.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Smoothing Dark Areas in Molecular Latent Diffusion

Authors:
Xi Wang↗Jiahan Li↗Yuxuan Xia↗Yingcheng Wu↗Shaoyi Zheng↗Shengjie Wang↗

arXiv:2606.13955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent diffusion is a promising framework for scalable 3D molecular generation, but it requires a latent space that remains smooth, valid, and navigable beyond posterior samples. Existing molecular VAEs, however, are typically learned through reconstruction-based objectives, which do not guarantee such a latent space. We show that this leads to dark areas: regions of latent space that are reachable during diffusion sampling but decode to disconnected or chemically invalid molecules. Unlike in image generation, molecular decoding requires strict structural and chemical precision, so even small latent perturbations can produce catastrophic failures. We therefore propose TopVAE, a topology-optimized VAE that reduces dark areas by making the decoder internalize structural and chemical constraints during training, eliminating the need for test-time chemical correction. TopVAE greatly improves off-posterior robustness, and when paired with a standard DiT, achieves $77\%$ lower FCD-3D on QM9, the highest V&C, $52\%$ lower FCD-3D on GEOM-Drugs, and $1.29{\times}$ more stable and connected molecules on zero-shot scaffold inpainting.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Rarity-Gated Context Conditioning for Offline Imitation Learning-Based Maritime Anomaly Detection

Authors:
Yongmin Kim↗ByeongHoon Jeon↗Sungil Kim↗

arXiv:2606.13311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contextual anomaly detection aims to identify abnormal behavior conditional on context variables, but practical deployments often face highly imbalanced context distributions where rare regimes can be critical information. Under such frequency bias, context-conditioned models can produce unstable decisions and excessive false alarms in rare contexts. We propose Rarity-Gated Feature-wise Linear Modulation (RGFiLM), a rarity-aware conditioning module that combines feature-wise modulation (i.e., context-conditioned scaling and shifting of hidden features) with a gate controlled by a data-driven rarity score. The rarity score is estimated from the empirical distribution of context variables and regulates how strongly context modulates intermediate representations: the gate becomes more decisive under rare contexts while remaining conservative under frequent contexts. We evaluate RGFiLM on maritime trajectory anomaly detection using AIS motion sequences with ERA5 environmental context in an environment-sensitive detour scenario. When instantiated in a sequential anomaly scoring pipeline, RGFiLM achieves the best mean F1–False Positive Rate (FPR) trade-off among the compared context-agnostic and context-conditioned methods. These results suggest that explicitly accounting for context rarity is an effective approach for reducing false alarms in context-sensitive anomaly detection.

Read & Discuss → View Source →