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

GeneralVLA-2: Geometry-Aware Reconstruction and Governed Memory for Robot Planning

Generalist vision-language-action systems need object-centric 3D evidence and reusable manipulation experience to plan reliable robot trajectories. GeneralVLA provides a hierarchical interface for converting language and RGB-D observations into 3D end-effector paths, but two bottlenecks remain. First, monocular SAM3D-style object reconstruction can hallucinate pose and unseen geometry, while manipulation benefits from stable object shape when calibrated multi-view observations are available. Second, the original KnowledgeBank mainly retrieves semantically similar snippets and appends new knowledge, which makes it difficult to control memory quality, conflicts, confidence, and geometric relevance. To address the first challenge, we introduce GeoFuse-MV3D, a geometry-prior-guided MV-SAM3D reconstruction branch that verifies external geometry cues with input-view masks, applies soft visual-hull support, performs axis-wise refinement, and fuses only geometry while preserving appearance. To address the second challenge, we upgrade KnowledgeBank into a governed long-term memory system with explicit quality, confidence, lifecycle, verifier, and conflict metadata, together with precision-oriented retrieval. Finally, we evaluate the reconstruction branch on GSO-30 and the memory module on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and SWE-Bench Verified; GeoFuse-MV3D improves over the MV-SAM3D baseline by reducing CD and LPIPS by 2.20% and 2.02% while increasing PSNR and SSIM by 2.36% and 1.03%, and KnowledgeBank improves over ReasoningBank by 4.53% on Terminal-Bench SR and 3.73% on SWE-Bench resolve rate, while reducing AS by 4.95% and 5.65%, respectively. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/GeneralVLA-2. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/GeneralVLA-2.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Bridging the Gap: Enabling Natural Language Queries for NoSQL Databases through Text-to-NoSQL Translation

arXiv:2502.11201v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: NoSQL databases are core data infrastructure, yet natural-language access to them remains underdeveloped: correct query generation must recover how a non-relational data model represents entities, nested paths, arrays, missing fields, and dynamic keys. This paper studies Text-to-NoSQL, translating natural-language requests into executable NoSQL queries, instantiated with MongoDB aggregation pipelines over schema-less document stores. We present TEND, short for Text-to-NoSQL Dataset, an execution-verified benchmark with 1,210 MongoDB-native tasks across 11 databases. To our knowledge, TEND is the first Text-to-NoSQL benchmark whose database worlds are MongoDB-native by design: experts manually define collection boundaries, nested arrays, optional and sparse paths, polymorphic shapes, and dynamic-key conventions; these worlds are populated with real data and verified through frozen MongoDB execution, so TEND evaluates schema-less document reasoning rather than SQL-to-MQL transfer. We further introduce SAG, a Schema-as-Data Grounding solver that induces path and value grounding from stored-document evidence before bounded MQL generation, execution-grounded repair, and result-consistency selection. Evaluation uses bounded column-tolerant execution accuracy (EXC) as the headline metric, complemented by a graded result-set F1 and a mutually exclusive execution-outcome decomposition. Experiments show that LLMs with strong NL2SQL performance degrade substantially on TEND, validating Text-to-NoSQL as a distinct schema-less document reasoning problem.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Room-Specialized Mixture-of-Experts for In-Home ADL Recognition with Ambient Sensors

Monitoring activities of daily living (ADLs) in the home is a promising approach for tracking dementia progression in older adults. While ambient sensor-based ADL systems are well-studied, most existing ADL recognition systems rely on globally trained models that ignore the spatial organization of in-home activities. In real deployments, where training data are sparse and highly home-specific, global transformer models may fail to capture room-dependent behavioral structure. We propose a deterministic Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture for in-home ADL recognition, in which each expert is a compact transformer specialized to one room of the home (bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, living area). Input segments are routed using a deterministic gating strategy based on room-level motion activity and time-of-day priors for sleep-related behaviors. Unlike learned routing networks, the proposed gate encodes domain knowledge about where ADLs are likely to occur, reducing model complexity under limited per-home training data. By decomposing ADL recognition into room-specific activity spaces, the proposed architecture reduces competition between dominant and low-frequency activities under highly imbalanced residential data. We evaluated the system on data collected via low-cost ambient sensors (motion, light, temperature, humidity) and Raspberry Pi edge devices across five homes, with ground-truth ADL labels provided by participants and caregivers. Across the five homes, the proposed MoE consistently outperformed global transformer, 1D CNN, and Random Forest baselines, achieving macro-F1 scores ranging from 0.60 to 0.88, highlighting the importance of home-specific modeling in real-world deployments. These findings suggest that room-aware expert specialization may provide a practical and interpretable strategy for low-data ADL recognition in real-world residential environments.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On a class of reflected McKean-Vlasov Stochastic Differential Equations with jumps

arXiv:2606.18433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates a class of reflected McKean-Vlasov Stochastic Differential Equations driven by both Brownian motion and a compensated Poisson random measure. We establish the existence and uniqueness of solutions and provide moments estimates for the state processes.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Strategic Non-Shareability of Quantum Correlations

Authors:

arXiv:2605.25516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Correlations distributed by a mediator can be useful for coordination but vulnerable to inheritance by a colluder. We formalize the obstruction to such inheritance as a source-certified resource theory of strategic non-shareability. The free objects are symmetrically extendible sources, the free operations are shareability-preserving maps, and the trace distance to the free set is a faithful convex monotone. For Werner and isotropic sources in arbitrary local dimension, the resource has the exact form $D_m=c(d)(p-p_m^{*})_{+}$, with $p_m^{*}$ the Johnson–Viola shareability threshold. For qubit Werner sources, tomographically complete Pauli measurements yield the exact one-colluder capacity\[ C^tomo_1(p)=\frac{1}{12}\Bigl[(3p-1)-\sqrt{(3p+1)(1-p)}\,\Bigr]_{+}.\] We prove that this anti-collusion resource is independent of Bellnonlocality: the Bell and shareability orderings cross, so some Bell-nonlocal states are strictly less collusion-resistant than Bell-local ones. Finally, we give an aligned Pauli coordination game whose observed behaviour has a local hidden-variable model for every visibility, making device-independent certification empty, while source-certified quantum anti-collusion is positive exactly above the extendibility threshold. These results identify symmetric non-extendibility, rather than Bell nonlocality, as the boundary of source-certified collusion resistance.

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

Scalable anomaly detection via a univariate Christoffel function

arXiv:2606.12483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anomaly detection plays a critical role in identifying unusual patterns across domains such as fraud detection, network intrusion, and system fault diagnosis. Recently, Christoffel function-based methods, rooted in polynomial optimization, have emerged as promising alternatives to deep learning due to their strong mathematical foundations and computational frugality. However, their practical applicability is hindered by the need to invert a matrix whose size grows exponentially with the data dimension, rendering the method intractable even for moderate-dimensional datasets. This paper addresses the dimensionality limitations of Christoffel function-based anomaly detection while preserving its key theoretical properties, i.e., the on-off support dichotomy behavior and the accurate support shape capture. We introduce UCF, a univariate Christoffel function which is based on the squared distance between the query point and the support points. Extensive experiments on the ADBench benchmark demonstrate that UCF consistently outperforms 14 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of Average Precision. By resolving the scalability bottleneck of the Christoffel Function, this work expands the toolkit of anomaly detection methods with a robust, theoretically grounded, and universally applicable approach.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The Almost Intelligent Revolution: Options for Scaling Up Deliberation and Empowering People with AI

Authors:

The increasing prominence of Large Language Models (LLMs) in public discourse presents both opportunities and challenges for democratic deliberation. While red teaming strategies help mitigate specific risks, broader concerns persist regarding linguistic constraints, biases, and the sycophantic tendencies of LLMs. This chapter explores how LLMs can be used to significantly scale up and democratise deliberation, particularly in fostering inclusivity and empowering traditionally marginalised groups. Drawing on concepts from Systemic-Functional Linguistics, the chapter examines how variations across language users (for example, with respect to socio-demographic groups) and across language use (for example, with respect to communicative functions) shape participation in AI-supported deliberation. The chapter presents AI-driven deliberation studies and assesses their potential to scaffold argumentation, enhance access, and reduce the influence of exclusionary linguistic norms and biases which are embedded in prestigious registers. At the same time, the chapter cautions against both overclaiming, which leads to unrealistic expectations, and underclaiming, which risks missed opportunities for AI-assisted engagement. The chapter concludes by identifying future research directions to maximise the democratic potential of AI-assisted participation while embedding ethical safeguards to counteract the reproduction of linguistic inequalities.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Antibodies against influenza A/H1N1pdm2009 and B/Victoria strains but not A/H3N2 are increased in recent onset type 1 narcolepsy versus matched controls

Study Objectives: Onsets of Narcolepsy type-1 (NT1) increased following A/H1N1 vaccination with PandemrixTM in Europe and with A/H1N1pdm2009 infections in China and other countries. To test if other strains could trigger narcolepsy, we measured strain-specific antibodies in patients with recent onset NT1 compared to controls. Methods: Antibodies against hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) were tested in 62 patients with very recent onset (onset and blood collection following a single flu season, mean +/- SEM: 0.44 +/- 0.06 years since onset) and 100 controls matched by age, sex, season and year of collection (2000-2025). Results were next extended to 181 recent onset patients (mean +/- SEM: 1.00 +/- 0.05 years) versus 260 controls, matched by sex, season and year, but having a slightly higher mean age. HA inhibition (HAI) and NA inhibition (NAI) assays were conducted using flu strains known to circulate during the corresponding flu seasons. HAI results are shown as % positive (titers >= 40) and NAI results as geometric mean titers. Odds ratio (OR) and coefficient were used to compare antibody titers in NT1 versus controls. The contribution of each assay to prediction was finally quantified in the larger sample set using Shapley decomposition. Results: NT1 patients had increased anti-HA and anti-NA antibodies against A/H1N1pdm2009 (anti-HA OR = 3.86, anti-NA coefficient = 0.35) and B/Victoria (anti-HA OR =1.90, anti-NA coefficient = 0.22), but not A/H1N1pre2009, A/H3N2, or B/Yamagata, independent of HLA-DQB1*06:02 status, age, sex, and flu season. Correlations between anti-HA and anti-NA antibodies titers were weak to moderate but significant (r2=-0.10 to 0.34). Multivariable model outperformed age-only baseline (McFadden R2 = 0.19 vs. 0.03; AUC = 0.79 vs. 0.64; likelihood-ratio test X2 = 51, p

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

How LLMs Fail and Generalize in RTL Coding for Hardware Design?

Translating sequential programming priors into the parallel temporal logic of hardware design remains a crucial bottleneck for large language models(LLM). To investigate this, we introduce a new error taxonomy grounded in problem solvability, inspired by cognitive theory. Our taxonomy categorizes failures into syntactic, semantic, solvable functional, and unsolvable functional types. Evaluations reveal a strict empirical ceiling on the VerilogEval benchmark, as frontier models plateau at a 90.8% initial pass rate. These plateaus are defined by unsolvable functional errors, exposing persistent knowledge gaps immune to test time compute scaling. Furthermore, we expose a striking surface convergence gap: optimization readily eliminates syntax errors but concurrently exacerbates deeper functional failures. Our findings demonstrate that alignment techniques merely teach models to compile. While repeated sampling strategies can patch solvable errors, register-transfer level(RTL) coding capacity remains strictly bounded by pretraining knowledge. Addressing challenges in the current LLM based hardware generation pipeline requires more studies in model reasoning rather than alignment interventions.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

CADBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for AI-Assisted CAD Program Generation

arXiv:2605.10873v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recovering editable CAD programs from images or 3D observations is central to AI-assisted design, but progress is difficult to measure because existing evaluations are fragmented across datasets, modalities, and metrics. We introduce CADBench, a unified benchmark for multimodal CAD program generation. CADBench contains 18,000 evaluation samples spanning six benchmark families derived from DeepCAD, Fusion 360, ABC, MCB, and Objaverse; five input modalities including clean meshes, noisy meshes, single-view renders, photorealistic renders, and multi-view renders; and six metrics covering geometric fidelity, executability, and program compactness. STEP-based families are stratified by B-rep face count and all families are diversity-sampled to support controlled analysis across complexity and object variation. We benchmark eleven CAD-specialized and general-purpose vision-language systems, generating more than 1.4 million CAD programs. Under idealized inputs, specialized mesh-to-CAD models substantially outperform code-generating VLMs, which remain far from reliable CAD program reconstruction. CADBench further reveals three recurring failure modes: reconstruction quality degrades with geometric complexity, CAD-specialized models can be brittle under modality shift, and model rankings change across metrics. Together, these results position CADBench as a diagnostic testbed for measuring progress in editable 3D reconstruction and multimodal CAD understanding. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/anniedoris/CADBench.

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

MemRefine: LLM-Guided Compression for Long-Term Agent Memory

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate over long-term interactions, where information from past dialogues must be preserved and recalled to support future tasks. However, as interactions accumulate, the memory store grows without bound and fills with redundant entries that inflate storage cost and degrade retrieval by crowding out the most useful evidence. Furthermore, this is especially limiting on resource-constrained platforms with hard memory budgets, motivating us to formulate storage-budgeted memory management, the task of keeping an already constructed memory store within a fixed budget while preserving information useful for future interactions. To this end, we then propose MemRefine, an LLM-guided framework that, since surface similarity poorly reflects factual value, uses similarity only to propose candidate pairs and defers delete, merge, and preserve decisions to an LLM judge based on factual content, iterating until the budget is met. Across multiple memory frameworks and long-term conversation benchmarks, MemRefine consistently meets target budgets while preserving downstream performance and outperforming rule-based baselines under tight budgets.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

EgoPhys: Learning Generalizable Physics Models of Deformable Objects from Egocentric Video

Humans naturally understand object physics through everyday interactions, but faithfully predicting complex deformable dynamics, such as elastic materials and fabrics, remains a major challenge for computer vision and robotics. We present EgoPhys, a framework that constructs deformable physical digital twins from egocentric RGB-only video using generalizable priors. EgoPhys overcomes the limitations of existing methods to enable controllable deformable digital twin generation from egocentric videos by distilling per-object inverse-physics solutions into a compact codebook, enabling prediction of dense spring stiffness fields for unseen objects without per-spring test-time optimization. Trained with generalizable priors from diverse egocentric interactions, EgoPhys outperforms baselines in reconstruction, future prediction, and zero-shot generalization. To support training and evaluation, we curate an egocentric interaction dataset covering diverse deformable objects, scenes, and manipulation styles. We deploy EgoPhys on a real xArm6 robot, demonstrating that a digital twin initialized from a single egocentric human play video can serve as an internal world representation to aid in deformable-object planning, highlighting egocentric RGB observations as a scalable path toward real-to-sim pipelines.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Graph Instance Landscapes: When Structural Similarity Does (Not) Reflect Shortest-Path Performance

arXiv:2606.18267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarking shortest-path algorithms is commonly based on aggregate performance over heterogeneous graph sets, which limits insight into how different search paradigms react to instance structure. We adopt an instance-landscape view of graph benchmarking by embedding graphs into a low-cost structural feature space and clustering them into regions of similar structure. Three benchmark suites are studied: weighted Erdős–Rényi graphs, random geometric (wireless) graphs, and real-world road networks. We evaluate four representative shortest-path solvers spanning uninformed exact search (Dijkstra), bidirectional exact search (bidirectional Dijkstra), heuristic-guided exact search (A$^{*}$), and deque-based strategies (DEQ). Clustering robustness is analyzed under multiple feature-selection schemes, and runtime distributions are compared across landscape regions using non-parametric tests. While generator parameters induce stable structural regions, we find that feature-space similarity does not necessarily imply performance similarity: significant runtime shifts are frequently observed even within the same landscape region. A merged-suite analysis further shows that different benchmark families occupy largely disjoint regions. These results highlight both the potential and the limits of structural landscapes for the structure-aware benchmarking of shortest-path algorithms.

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

Quantum ring all-reduce: communication and privacy advantages for distributed learning

arXiv:2606.20344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning models have scaled to unprecedented sizes, making training across distributed devices the de facto standard in the field. In this work, we explore how quantum communications can make distributed training both more communication-efficient and information-theoretically private, for both classical and quantum learning models. Ring all-reduce is the foundational communication primitive for large-scale distributed training. We present a quantum version that reduces per-link online communication by a provably optimal factor of two using pre-shared entanglement and superdense coding, without requiring the learning model or gradient computation to change. Beyond bandwidth, the primitive enables privacy guarantees that are information-theoretically impossible for any classical protocol, achieving composable {\epsilon}-secure aggregation, via verified entanglement, at a 2x overhead in GHZ copies. Our hybrid quantum-classical communication architecture yields simultaneous communication and security advantages for large scale distributed training, regardless of whether the learning itself is quantum or classical. Finally, we characterise quantum advantages in gradient conflict detection for server-to-client communication under bandwidth constraints, a setting that arises after ring all-reduce is completed, when full gradient broadcast to external clients is infeasible. Two variants of the problem admit different separations. For margin-based alignment testing (\textsc{GapIP}_{\tau}), the quantum advantage is quadratic in the margin parameter: \widetilde{O}({\tau}^{-1}\log P) qubits versus \widetilde{O}(\min(\{\tau}^{-2},P)) bits. For sign-consistency auditing against a private parameter matching (\textsc{TieAudit}_{\epsilon}), the advantage represents an exponential separation in communication complexity: \Omega(\sqrt{P}) bits whereas O({\epsilon}^{-2}\log P) qubits suffice.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

WaveDINO: Learning-Based Atmospheric Correction of Unwrapped InSAR Interferograms Validated by GNSS: Results at Laguna del Maule and Campi Flegrei Volcanoes

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) enables effective monitoring of volcanic deformation; however, the observed signals are often corrupted by atmospheric phase delays, seasonal surface changes, and decorrelation effects. Existing atmospheric correction methods, such as numerical weather model-based methods, can reduce these effects but do not consistently remove atmospheric artefacts and may introduce residual biases. To address these limitations, we propose a novel learning-based method for denoising unwrapped InSAR interferograms, using a hybrid training strategy that combines physically motivated synthetic deformation with real atmospheric noise. Specifically, we introduce WaveDINO, a wavelet-based multi-scale denoising framework conditioned on frozen DINOv3 foundation-model features and terrain information. Training uses synthetic magma-source deformation superimposed on short-term interferograms to expose the network to realistic atmospheric statistics while retaining known ground truth. Performance is evaluated on both controlled synthetic data and long-term real interferograms from Laguna del Maule (Chile) and Campi Flegrei (Italy), with independent GNSS measurements used for validation. WaveDINO consistently outperforms competing models, improving agreement with GNSS measurements, and reducing mean GNSS misfit by approximately 3% and 19% at two sites, respectively, while surpassing weather-model-based corrections.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Whole-genome duplication shaped cell-type evolution in the vertebrate brain

Authors:

The complex brains of vertebrates have more cell types than those of their closest relatives. Whole-genome duplications (WGDs) occurred during early vertebrate evolution1, but it is unclear whether the duplicated genes (ohnologues) facilitated cell-type evolution. Here using brain single-cell transcriptomes from five chordates—human2, mouse3, lizard4, lamprey5 and amphioxus—we report that many cell-type families with conserved core transcription factors in vertebrates do not show one-to-one homology with amphioxus. Moreover, ohnologues, particularly those from the first WGD, were more important than small-scale duplication paralogues for vertebrate cell-type evolution. To explore whether ohnologues are mechanistically important for this process, we predicted ancestral cell-type states and compared them to amphioxus and experimentally investigated macroglia. The findings indicate that ohnologues had a role in early vertebrate cell-type diversification. Moreover, by examining paralogue expression across cell types and species, we show that expression changes were mainly driven by dosage selection and subfunctionalization. We also link ohnologues to cellular diversity at different anatomical and cell-type scales. Our findings demonstrate the importance of WGDs for the evolution of early vertebrate brain complexity and highlight that the resultant ohnologues continued to capacitate cell-type evolution long after they were formed. Analyses of brain single-cell transcriptomes from human, mouse, lizard, lamprey and amphioxus reveal that duplicated genes (ohnologues) played a pivotal part in early vertebrate cell-type diversification.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

REDACT: A Systematically Controlled Multilingual Benchmark for Personal Information Detection

Benchmark infrastructure for personally identifiable information (PII) detection remains limited: existing corpora cover few entity types, use ad hoc generation conditions, and do not show which surface conditions cause detector failures. We present REDACT, a systematically controlled multilingual PII benchmark with 13,427 records, 324,078 entity annotations, 51 entity types, 4,127 surface-form patterns, and 25 languages across 9 scripts. A strength-2 covering-array sampler controls nine generation axes: domain, format, difficulty, length, density, code-switching, language, adjacency, and co-occurrence. Three entity-level metadata fields (disclosure status, disclosure form, and a GDPR-aligned sensitivity tier) enable stratified evaluation beyond aggregate or per-type F1. From the full benchmark, we evaluate five detectors (Presidio, GLiNER, the OpenAI Privacy Filter, GPT-4.1, and Claude Sonnet 4.6) on a locked, language-stratified sample of 1,000 records. Aggregate F1 masks an architecture-dependent failure structure: the rule-based detector performs poorly on the highest-stakes data, including HIGH-sensitivity categories (recall 0.07) and non-verbatim disclosure forms, while the LLM detectors remain more robust, with the HIGH tier as their strongest sensitivity slice. A three-model reference-free LLM-as-judge assessment corroborates that sensitivity-tier assignment is the task's hardest axis. We release the benchmark, schema, prompts, and stratified evaluation harness.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Harsher on Male? Evaluating LLMs on Gender-Asymmetric Moral Framing Across Diverse Conflict Scenarios

Existing studies on gender bias in LLMs have largely focused on stereotypes, occupational associations, or explicit harmful outputs. In this work, we ask whether LLMs apply consistent response standards to the same negative behavior under matched male-actor and female-actor conditions. We introduce GAMA-Bench, a gender-mirrored benchmark of 1,298 scenarios covering intimate relationship and public social conflicts. It constructs gender-neutral misconduct templates through controlled grids and cross-model review, then compiles them into paired first-person prompts with matched actor-gender and role-reference variations. We further design a structured response-framing protocol to measure how models allocate punishment, empathy, escalation, instruction, and blame. Experiments on 10 representative LLMs reveal a consistent male-disadvantaging asymmetry: male actors receive more punitive, escalatory, and blame-centered framing, whereas female actors receive more therapeutic and empathy-oriented framing for the same misconduct. Further analyses show that this pattern persists across model families, scenario tracks, model scale, and explicit thinking-style reasoning. The official code is available at https://github.com/xufeiqiong/GAMA-Bench.

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

Fodor and Pylyshyn's Systematicity Challenge Still Stands

The recent successes of neural networks producing human-like language have caused significant stir in cognitive science, with many researchers arguing that classical puzzles about human cognition and challenges to artificial intelligence are being solved by neural networks. A notable case is the argument from systematicity due to Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, argues that humans display systematic biconditional dependencies. For example, someone can understand the sentence "John saw Mary" just in case that they understand the sentence "Mary saw John." Symbolic systems explain this systematicity of language and thought, while neural networks offer no immediate explanation. Several recent articles argue that this challenge has now been met by neural networks. In particular, Brenden Lake and Marco Baroni argue that their meta-learning for compositionality protocol matches and perhaps explains human systematicity. We demonstrate that these conclusions are premature. Among other results, we found that their model struggles to learn rules that are even slightly out of distribution compared to their training data. Furthermore, the model behaves unsystematically even on many within-distribution problems. We conclude that Fodor and Pylyshyn's challenge to neural networks remains unmet.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Solving Nonequilibrium Dynamics via Influence Matrix Bootstrap: Floquet-PXP Model

arXiv:2606.19430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies of integrable systems have profoundly deepened the fundamental understanding of quantum many-body physics. While equilibrium properties such as ground states and thermodynamics can often be characterized efficiently, accurately characterizing nonequilibrium integrable dynamics remains a significant challenge. Here, we address this problem in the "Rule 201" quantum cellular automaton, an integrable Trotterization of the PXP Hamiltonian. Using the tensor-network approach of the influence matrix, we develop local conditions called generalized zipper conditions that allow exact solutions of local dynamics. We also introduce a numerical bootstrap method for solving influence matrices with finite but relatively large bond dimensions. This uncovers a rich landscape of nonequilibrium behavior exhibiting initial-state dependence. As an example, we investigate the fate of persistent oscillating dynamics under local non-integrable perturbations, and present analytical results for non-thermal relaxation constrained by conservation laws. We also obtain numerically exact results for entanglement growth across a broad class of initial states. Furthermore, from an information-theoretic perspective, we identify a refined structure of multitime correlations termed the hidden Markov order: the memory encoded in the dynamics separates into finite-length and long-range distributed components, which becomes transparent in an exact split-index matrix-product-state representation of the influence matrix. Our approach enables unified investigations of nonthermalizing and thermalizing regimes of nonequilibrium dynamics within a single analytically tractable model, and can be tested experimentally in state-of-the-art quantum simulators such as Rydberg atom arrays.

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

Explosion and non-explosion in pure birth Crump–Mode–Jagers branching processes

arXiv:2601.06850v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this short note, we provide an explicit sufficient condition for non-explosion of Crump–Mode–Jagers branching processes with pure birth reproduction. It shows that the standard sufficient condition for explosion, namely the convergence of the series of reciprocals of the birth rates, is – at least for rate sequences without excessive oscillations – remarkably close to being necessary. At the same time, it is not necessary in full generality: we construct a counterexample which also yields a general preferential attachment tree without fitness with an infinite path and no vertices of infinite degree, thereby answering an open question previously raised in the literature.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Projected logical ensembles in surface codes via the random-matrix theory of quantum dots

arXiv:2606.17140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Measurements underpin active quantum error correction (QEC) and have been recognized as a source of novel measurement-induced many-body phenomena. Here, we study the statistical properties of post-measurement logical states arising in QEC on topological codes subject to deterministic transversal unitary gates. Upon syndrome extraction followed by maximum-likelihood decoding, a Born-weighted ensemble arises which we dub the "projected logical ensemble" (PLE). Focusing on surface codes subject to uniform single-qubit Pauli-$X$ rotations, we characterize the measurement-induced randomness of the PLE. To this end, we show that for a code with a single logical qubit, the PLE is isomorphic to an ensemble of scattering matrices describing mesoscopic quantum dots obtained from a 2D Majorana network model with suitable boundary conditions. We uncover regimes where these quantum dots are chaotic such that their scattering matrices are well-described by random matrix theory. In these regimes, the PLE approaches a universal ensemble that is maximally random up to symmetry and decoder-induced constraints. The symmetry constraints, set by stabilizer and logical operator weights, realize Altland-Zirnbauer classes D or DIII, which we both illustrate. Our results establish a fundamental connection between emergent universality concepts in mesoscopic physics, quantum many-body systems, and QEC.

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

RelayFormer: A Unified Local-Global Attention Framework for Scalable Image and Video Manipulation Localization

Visual manipulation localization (VML) aims to identify tampered regions in images and videos, a task that has become increasingly challenging with the rise of advanced editing tools. Existing methods face two central issues. The first is resolution diversity. Resizing or padding can distort subtle forensic cues and introduce unnecessary computational cost. The second is the difficulty of extending spatial models for images to spatio-temporal inputs in videos, which often results in maintaining separate architectures for the two data types. To address these challenges, we propose RelayFormer, a unified framework that adapts to varying resolutions and naturally handles both static and temporal visual data. RelayFormer partitions inputs into fixed-size sub-images and introduces Global Local Relay (GLR) tokens that propagate structured context through a relay-based attention mechanism. This design enables efficient exchange of global cues, such as semantic or temporal consistency, while preserving fine-grained manipulation artifacts. Unlike prior approaches that depend on uniform resizing or sparse attention, RelayFormer scales to variable resolutions and video sequences with minimal overhead. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate superior performance and strong efficiency, combining resolution adaptivity without interpolation or excessive padding, unified processing for images and videos, and a favorable balance between accuracy and computational cost. Code is available at~\href{https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer}{https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer}.

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

Hierarchical Multi-Modal Retrieval for Knowledge-Grounded News Image Captioning

Traditional image captioning methods often struggle to generate comprehensive, context-rich descriptions, especially for details not directly observable from visual cues. To overcome this, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented image captioning framework that generates captions with deeper insights, such as object attributes, event context, and underlying significance, by leveraging external knowledge. Our approach features a hierarchical multi-modal article retrieval mechanism that moves beyond monolithic text entities. This retrieval considers article structure-aware features, including weighted textual components (e.g., headlines, body sections) and visual placement patterns, alongside multi-faceted similarity computations (content–visual, visual–visual, and discourse positioning). A subsequent contextual relevance refinement stage further enhances the retrieved information. The retrieved articles then serve as the knowledge base for caption generation: first, a VLM generates a concise image description; second, we segment relevant information from the retrieved articles based on this description; and finally, an LLM utilizes both the description and extracted knowledge to generate a comprehensive, contextually detailed caption. We participated in the ACM Multimedia EVENTA 2025 Challenge and achieved 5th place with an overall score of 0.2824 on the private test set of the OpenEvent-V1 dataset. Source code is publicly released at https://github.com/mf0212/EVENTA-Challange.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Machine-learning clustering of close-in exoplanet populations: links to pebble accretion

arXiv:2606.11737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Close-in exoplanets exhibit a wide range of orbital architectures and physical properties shaped by both formation conditions and migration processes. Although population-synthesis models predict distinct planetary populations, establishing a quantitative connection between observed exoplanets and synthetic populations remains challenging. We investigate the intrinsic organisation of close-in exoplanets using physically motivated dynamical parameters and connect the resulting populations to pebble-accretion formation pathways. A two-stage Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is applied to an observed sample of close-in exoplanets, performing unsupervised probabilistic clustering in a feature space dominated by dynamical descriptors of planet-star interactions. The resulting clusters are mapped onto a pebble-accretion synthetic population within a statistically motivated three-dimensional parameter space. Formation-related quantities, including gas availability, gas fraction, and ice-rock mass ratio, are then used to interpret the mapped populations. We identify statistically supported sub-populations without imposing predefined classification boundaries, including very-massive gas giants, hot giants, warm-Jupiter-dominated systems, and lower-mass giants. The mapped synthetic populations reveal systematic differences in formation timing, gas accretion, and solid growth histories. In particular, very-massive gas giants are preferentially associated with earlier formation epochs than hot-giant and warm-Jupiter-dominated populations. These results demonstrate that physically motivated machine-learning approaches can provide a statistically robust framework for linking observed exoplanet populations to theoretical planet formation pathways.