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.AI) 2026-06-15

UltraSketchLLM: Sub-1-Bit LLM Compression via Sketch and Hardware-Friendly Operators

arXiv:2506.17255v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) require larger GPU memory size these days, necessitating efficient and extreme weight compression methods. Existing compression methods are either theoretically limited by 1 bit per weight or face severe performance degradation and inefficiency. To deploy LLMs in resource-constrained scenarios, we introduce UltraSketchLLM, compressing LLMs with data sketch. It reduces peak GPU memory footprint with a high compression rate down to 0.5 bit per weight. Combined with hardware-friendly implementation, UltraSketchLLM keeps tolerable performance degradation and extremely low latency overhead with 14.9x speedup compared to naive sketch solution.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Topological Quantum Interferometry

arXiv:2606.19730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured light provides high-dimensional Hilbert spaces holding tremendous potential for fundamental quantum optics and quantum technologies. However, existing characterization methods, like Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference, typically assume perfectly tuned conditions, overlooking the geometric physics governing spatial mode evolution. Here, we establish topological quantum interferometry driven by an interaction-based geometric phase, the exchange Berry phase (BPX). Our formalism generalizes $q$-plate state generation and characterization to arbitrary topological charges and (de)tuning conditions, demonstrating that BPX acts as a geometric marker governing spatial interference. We show BPX serves as a deterministic control parameter, decomposing two-photon spatial patterns into geometry-dictated fundamental modes. This mapping reveals topological invariants and phase singularities that function as a non-tomographic witness for state dimensionality estimation, circumventing full-state reconstruction. Being device-independent and highly scalable, this approach enables scalable high-dimensional characterization and topologically protected state selection, with direct applicability to quantum metrology and high-capacity quantum networks.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Characterisation of disease progression in hantavirus haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome

Hantaviruses can cause haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS). This is a clinically variable disease in which severe outcomes are hypothesized to arise from dysregulated host responses. To characterise this, longitudinal, label-free plasma proteomics was used to compare disease progression in a unique well-defined cohort of patients infected with either Dobrava virus (DOBV) or Puumala virus (PUUV) hantaviruses. Patients were stratified by clinical severity. The average viral load in the first available sample from hospitalized patients was higher in those who went on to have severe infection, and higher in patients infected with DOBV. There was marked separation of infected patients from controls across early, mid and late disease, including after viral RNA clearance, suggesting a sustained systemic host-response signature. Proteomic signatures were consistent with a strong acute-phase response in both mild and severe disease. There was evidence of activation of the adaptive humoral response at later stages. Hierarchical clustering identified severity-associated pathways linked to endothelial dysfunction, thrombocytopenia, vascular leakage and renal injury. These findings define a durable plasma proteomic signature of hantavirus disease and support a model in which severe HFRS is driven by persistent inflammatory, complement and platelet/coagulation pathway activation rather than viral burden alone.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bring My Cup! Personalizing Vision-Language-Action Models with Visual Attentive Prompting

arXiv:2512.20014v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize well to generic instructions, they struggle with personalized commands such as "bring my cup," where the robot must act on one specific instance among visually similar objects. We study this setting of manipulating personal objects, in which a VLA must identify and control a user-specific object unseen during training using only a few reference images. To address this challenge, we propose Visual Attentive Prompting (VAP), a simple-yet-effective training-free perceptual adapter that equips frozen VLAs with top-down selective attention. VAP treats the reference images as a non-parametric visual memory, grounds the personal object in the scene through open-vocabulary detection and embedding-based matching, and then injects this grounding as a visual prompt by highlighting the object and rewriting the instruction. We construct two simulation benchmarks, Personalized-SIMPLER and Personalized-VLABench, and a real-world tabletop benchmark to evaluate personalized manipulation across multiple robots and tasks. Experiments show that VAP consistently outperforms generic policies and token-learning baselines in both success rate and correct-object manipulation, helping to bridge the gap between semantic understanding and instance-level control.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

When the Same Musical Knowledge Forgets Differently: A Clean Probe of Pathway-Dependent Forgetting

A model can learn that the piano piece Für Elise is calm and reflective by listening to the audio or by reading a text description, but does it matter which route that knowledge took when it is later at risk of being forgotten? Forgetting research in multimodal models measures what knowledge is lost under adaptation, yet has not asked whether acquisition route affects how easily that knowledge is forgotten. We call this untested premise the Pathway-Invariant Assumption. Music understanding enables a clean test because a music clip and a canonical text description can be aligned to the same perceptual content, allowing the same knowledge unit to enter a model through listening or reading while the target remains fixed. Across multiple architecturally distinct audio-language models, we observe a consistent asymmetry: text-pathway knowledge is forgotten more than matched audio-pathway knowledge under identical adaptation pressure. To attribute this effect to route rather than confounds, we introduce the Paired Pathway Controlled Protocol (PPCP), a three-phase design that establishes matched pathway baselines, activates both pathways under symmetric supervision on the same knowledge pool, and applies identical forgetting pressure to both pathways. The gap is stable across models and gain-controlled analyses, persists when contradictory overwrite is replaced by correct-label cross-domain learning, remains under single-modality pressure, and is not removed by lightweight replay. Two independent routing-depth controls confirm that the effect is not explained by architectural depth, pointing to input representation as the dominant factor. Under PPCP, our results demonstrate that forgetting is highly route-dependent, establishing acquisition route as a new analytical dimension for forgetting research and multimodal system design.

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

HRDX: A Large-Scale Vector HD-Map Dataset

Reliable autonomous driving requires vectorized HD maps that are geometrically accurate, semantically rich, and scalable to long-horizon driving. However, existing public HD map datasets are limited in scale, provide sparse semantic attributes, and lack modalities such as aerial imagery that could enable new research directions. We present HRDX, a large-scale dataset for vector HD-map construction, spanning about 40 hours (1,400 km) of minimally overlapping drives, which is several times larger than prior public HD map datasets. Data is captured using six synchronized surround cameras, a 128-beam LiDAR, and centimeter-level RTK GNSS/IMU, and is further complemented by precisely aligned aerial orthoimagery. Annotations cover 10 vector map classes, complemented with over 20 semantic and topological attributes. To evaluate this richer ontology, we introduce the Composite Score (CS) to jointly assess geometric fidelity and attribute correctness. Benchmark experiments show that HRDX's scale improves online vector-map construction, and that aligned aerial imagery provides a useful structural prior: using aerial imagery at training and/or inference improves geometric map quality, while aerial-augmented teachers can transfer part of this benefit to camera-only students without increasing inference-time sensor requirements. HRDX is intended to support reproducible research on large-scale HD-map learning, multimodal BEV fusion, and training-time privileged information. HRDX dataset and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/honda-research-institute/HRDX

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

Unreduced Persistence Diagrams for Topological Machine Learning

arXiv:2507.07156v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised machine learning pipelines trained on features derived from persistent homology have been experimentally observed to ignore much of the information contained in a persistence diagram. Computing persistence diagrams is often the most computationally demanding step in such a pipeline, however. To explore this dynamic, we introduce several methods to generate topological feature vectors from unreduced boundary matrices and investigate their theoretical and computational properties. We compared the performance of pipelines trained on vectorizations of unreduced PDs to vectorizations of fully-reduced PDs across several data and task types. Our results indicate that models trained on PDs built from unreduced diagrams can perform on par and even outperform those trained on fully-reduced diagrams on some tasks. We also benchmarked the computational performance of an algorithm for computing unreduced diagrams, which was implemented as a heavily modified version of Ripser. These computations are parallelizable and required an order of magnitude less memory on average compared to computing full persistence diagrams. Our results suggest that machine learning pipelines which incorporate topology-based features may benefit in terms of computational cost and performance by utilizing information contained in unreduced boundary matrices.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LoLA: Low-Rank Linear Attention With Sparse Caching

The per-token cost of transformer inference scales with context length, preventing its application to lifelong in-context learning. Linear attention is an efficient alternative that maintains a constant memory footprint, even on infinite context lengths. While this is a potential candidate for lifelong learning, it falls short in memory capacity. In this paper, we propose LoLA, a training-free augmentation to linear attention that boosts associative recall. LoLA distributes past key-value pairs from context into three memory systems: (i) recent pairs in a local sliding window cache; (ii) difficult-to-memorize pairs in a sparse, global cache; and (iii) generic pairs in the recurrent hidden state of linear attention. We show through ablations that our self-recall error metric is crucial to efficiently manage long-term associative memories. On pass-key retrieval tasks, LoLA improves the base model's performance from 0.6% to 97.4% accuracy. This is achieved with a 4.6x smaller cache than Llama-3.1 8B on 4K context length. LoLA also outperforms other 1B and 8B parameter subquadratic models on zero-shot commonsense reasoning tasks.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Prior over Evidence: Stereotype-Driven Diagnosis in LLM-Based L2 Pronunciation Feedback

Large language models are increasingly deployed for written pronunciation feedback in second-language (L2) English learning, under the assumption that their diagnoses are grounded in the supplied speech evidence rather than in priors from pretraining. This assumption is tested on 1,800 L2-Arctic utterances spanning six L1 backgrounds, three audio-capable LLMs, four pronunciation dimensions, and five evidence conditions ranging from a text-only baseline to numeric acoustic features and raw audio. Each (utterance x model x condition x dimension) cell is scored on three metrics: Rating Accuracy (RA) against gold labels, Evidence Coherence (EC) assessing internal consistency without ground truth, and Grounded Correctness (GC) evaluated against gold evidence. Results show three findings across models. First, rating accuracy and grounded reasoning decouple: 39.6% of judged cells contain internally coherent reasoning that supports a wrong rating, against only 15.8% where the reasoning supports a correct rating. Second, phoneme-level feedback converges to a fixed inventory of L2-English difficulty phones that recurs across all six L1 backgrounds and all evidence conditions. Third, acoustic evidence improves the rating only when the supplied feature directly probes the target dimension: textualised F0 range raises pitch-variation grounding from (0.18-0.19) to (0.45-0.62) across all three models, while stress and phoneme correctness, which require target-to-realisation alignment, remain ungrounded. The same audio waveform without textualised F0 values does not reproduce this improvement. These findings indicate that current general-purpose LLMs are more reliable as verbalisers of externally computed pronunciation evidence than as standalone diagnostic engines.

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

Given, When, Then, Again: Mining Subscenario Refactoring Candidates in Behaviour-Driven Test Suites with ML Classifiers and LLM-Judge Baselines

Context. Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) test suites accumulate duplicated step subsequences. Three published refactoring patterns are available (within-file Background, within-repo reusable-scenario invocation, cross-organisational shared higher-level step), but no prior work automates which recurring subsequences are worth extracting or which mechanism applies. Objective. Rank recurring step subsequences ("slices") by refactoring suitability (extraction-worthy), pre-map each to one of the three patterns, and quantify prevalence across the public BDD ecosystem. Method. Every contiguous L-step window (L in [2, 18]) in a 339-repository / 276-upstream-owner Gherkin corpus is keyed by paraphrase-robust cluster identifiers and counted under three scopes. SBERT / UMAP / HDBSCAN clustering recovers paraphrase-equivalent slices. Three authors label a stratified 200-slice pool against a written rubric. An XGBoost extraction-worthy classifier trained under 5-fold cross-validation is compared with a tuned rule baseline and two open-weight Large Language Model (LLM) judges. Results. The miner produces 5,382,249 slices collapsing to 692,020 recurring patterns. Three-author Fleiss' kappa = 0.56 (extraction-worthy) and 0.79 (mechanism). The classifier reaches out-of-fold F1 = 0.891 (95% CI [0.852, 0.927]), outperforming both the rule baseline (F1 = 0.836, p = 0.017) and the better LLM judge (F1 = 0.728, p = 1.5e-4). 75.0%, 59.5%, and 11.7% of scenarios carry a within-file Background, within-repo reusable-scenario, and cross-organisational shared-step candidate, respectively; the figures are stable under a sweep of the classifier decision threshold. Conclusion. Paraphrase-robust subscenario discovery yields a corpus-wide census of BDD refactoring candidates; pipeline, classifier predictions, labelled pool, and rubric are released under Apache-2.0.

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

MASCOT-Android: A Curated Dataset and Automated Collection Pipeline for Android Malware Source Code Specimens

arXiv:2606.16072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compared with binaries and decompiled code, malware source code more directly reflects the attackers' original intent. However, the scarcity of source code and the high cost of manual review make such datasets difficult to build and maintain. We propose MASCOT-Android, a curated dataset of Android malware source code and an automated collection framework for scalable malware source code discovery on GitHub. A key finding of our work is that repository-level documentation alone provides a strong signal for malware source code collection. Our model extracts character-level TF-IDF features from 8,772 malware and 25,747 benign README documents and trains a LinearSVC classifier to distinguish malware repositories. This README-only model achieves an accuracy of 96.28\% and an FPR of 1.06\% in local evaluation. In addition, the model outputs confidence scores, allowing users to adjust the decision threshold to balance FPR and coverage, which is practical in real-world malware source code collection.

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

FP8 is All You Need (Part 1): Debunking Hardware FP64 as the HPC Holy Grail (June 13th version)

arXiv:2606.06510v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Conventional HPC holds that native hardware FP64 is the irreducible foundation of scientific computing. On AI-optimized GPUs of the NVIDIA B300 generation and beyond, native FP64 throughput has collapsed to ~1.3 TFLOPS even as FP8 tensor throughput has grown to multiple PFLOPS. We argue something stronger than that this is survivable: the FP8 tensor-core matrix-multiply is the sole computational primitive on which double-precision scientific computing needs to be built. Every canonical kernel – dense and sparse linear algebra, spectral transforms, stencils – and every application composing them reduces, via the Chinese Remainder Theorem-based Ozaki Scheme II, to sequences of FP8 matrix operations; the only non-FP8 arithmetic is a bounded, fixed-width integer accumulation at reconstruction. Native FP64 is thereby demoted from a hardware requirement to a derived accuracy guarantee obtained by composition over the FP8 primitive. We organize the claim as a five-layer hierarchy – the FP8 op, Ozaki II, the basic kernels or Berkeley "dwarfs", composite solvers, and full applications – and, because the dwarf taxonomy already spans scientific computing, establish it by exhibiting the reduction for every dwarf rather than a sample. The claim is falsifiable, and we build the instrument that tests it: a Tensor-Memory Equilibrium (TME) model extending the Roofline with emulation parameters (alpha, beta, gamma). We identify register-level fusion as the mechanism that keeps emulation memory-bound, project recovered FP64 performance across B300 and Rubin against an H100 baseline, and close the kernel coverage with a companion FFT analysis and compensated reductions. The model could have returned a negative verdict; instead it passes across the dwarfs and their compositions. This is the analytical half of a two-part program, with a follow-on implementation to validate the thesis on real silicon.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Rumination as a cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement: evidence from the CARING study

Purpose. Perinatal loss is associated with a high risk of persistent psychological distress, including prolonged grief, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Cognitive processes such as rumination may play a crucial role in maintaining and amplifying distress following loss, yet their specific contribution in perinatal bereavement remains underexplored. Methods. The CARING (Cognitive Analysis and Rumination INvestigation in perinatal Grief) study employed a cross-sectional design involving 298 parents who experienced perinatal loss within the previous five years. Participants completed an anonymous online survey including measures of depressive rumination (Ruminative Response Scale, RRS), angry rumination (Anger Rumination Scale, ARS), perinatal grief (Perinatal Grief Scale, PGS), general psychopathology (SCL-90), and post-traumatic stress symptoms (NSESSS). Non-parametric analyses were conducted to examine associations between rumination patterns and psychological outcomes. Results. Higher levels of rumination were significantly associated with greater perinatal grief, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and post-traumatic stress. Depressive rumination showed consistently stronger associations with all outcomes compared to angry rumination. Participants presenting both depressive and angry rumination exhibited the highest levels of grief intensity, psychological distress, and PTSD symptoms, suggesting a graded relationship between rumination patterns and severity of distress. Rumination levels were not significantly associated with gestational age at loss or with having received psychological support. Conclusions. Rumination, particularly in its depressive form, appears to function as a transdiagnostic cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement. These findings highlight rumination as a potential target for early screening and tailored psychological interventions aimed at reducing long-term distress following perinatal loss.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

teasr: training-efficient any-step diffusion transformer for real-world image super-resolution

Diffusion models excel in Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) due to their powerful generative priors but suffer from slow iterative sampling. Although existing one-step distillation methods accelerate inference, they typically require auxiliary teacher models that inflate training memory and restrict scalability to large-scale architectures. Furthermore, these fixed-step models lack the flexibility to trade off speed for quality. In this paper, we propose TEASR, a training-efficient any-step diffusion framework for Real-ISR that enables both one-step and multi-step restoration within a unified model. Our key idea is to perform self-adversarial distillation within a single diffusion model, eliminating the need for auxiliary teachers or discriminators. Specifically, we propose a timestep-aware rectification strategy that stabilizes one-step generation across noise levels. These two designs further enables the distillation of 20B-parameter diffusion models on a single GPU, significantly improving training efficiency. Moreover, we introduce a dual-branch diffusion transformer with decoupled timestep condition to separate the current noise state and the denoising target to enhance sampling quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TEASR supports seamless any-step sampling and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets.

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

Edit the Bits, Diff the Codes: Bitwise Residual Editing for Visual Autoregressive Models

Text-guided image editing with visual autoregressive (VAR) generators requires controlling both what the model samples and where the sampled change is written back into the image code. Existing VAR editors mainly operate on token streams, features, or flat next-token logits, leaving two native structures of bitwise-residual VAR models underused: the per-bit Bernoulli prediction head and the additive multi-scale residual code field from which the image is assembled. We propose BitResEdit, a training-free editor for bitwise-residual VAR generators such as Infinity. BitEdit performs source-negative guidance by tilting the post-CFG per-bit log-odds along a source–target contrast computed on a shared edited prefix, then projects each update into a closed-form Bernoulli-KL trust region around the clean CFG sampler. ResEdit converts the sampled bits into per-scale continuous-code residuals, gates them with a localization mask, and re-injects them through the generator's native sum-of-scales. Together they couple decision-time bit guidance with combination-time code composition, so masked-out latent features are preserved exactly by code arithmetic while localized, scale-aware edits are applied inside the target region. On PIE-Bench with Infinity-2B, BitResEdit attains the strongest text alignment among same-backbone VAR editors, improving CLIP on the edited region by +1.07 over the strongest prior editor while keeping background preservation competitive with it. Ablations show BitEdit and ResEdit play complementary roles in target alignment and background preservation.

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

Differentiable Packing of Irregular 3D Objects with Adaptive Container Estimation

Most existing approaches either fix the container in advance or optimize only a single container dimension through an outer search loop, leaving the remaining dimensions as a manual tuning problem. We present a differentiable packing framework that jointly optimizes all 6N object pose parameters and all three container side lengths inside a single gradient-based loop. The formulation combines six physics-inspired, differentiable loss terms computed directly on triangle meshes through axis-aligned bounding-box proxies. An adaptive squeezing mechanism periodically tightens the container whenever the overlap loss falls below a pair-count-scaled threshold, producing a large initial drop in container volume, followed by small refinements. All pairwise computations are written in tensor-broadcasting form, giving a 3.4 to 54 times speedup over a reference loop-based implementation. The pipeline is implemented in Python and PyTorch, with no physics engine, FFT library, or convex decomposition. On multiple object categories, the method produces containers that are 11 to 32 percent smaller than time-matched DBLF and simulated-annealing baselines at N =100, while running in under 4 minutes per instance on a single consumer GPU.

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

CacheMuon: Using Temporal Preconditioning To Approximate Polar Factor

arXiv:2606.16371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an optimizer that computes updates using the polar factor of the momentum matrix and has shown strong empirical performance across a range of training settings. A key component of Muon is the Newton-Schulz iteration used to compute this polar factor. Although this avoids the cost of an exact singular value decomposition, it remains expensive in practice because it is applied at every optimization step. At the same time, the momentum matrix changes smoothly over training, suggesting strong temporal correlation in the corresponding polar factors. In this paper, we exploit this structure and propose CacheMuon, a temporal preconditioning method that reuses information from previous optimization steps to approximate the polar factor at the current step. This reduces redundant orthogonalization computation across iterations. We analyze CacheMuon as an inexact Muon update, with error controlled by fresh-solver error and cache staleness. Empirically, CacheMuon provides a controllable quality-efficiency frontier: conservative thresholds closely match fresh Muon on language-model and vision training while reducing orthogonalization FLOPs, whereas more aggressive thresholds yield larger arithmetic savings at the cost of modest validation-quality degradation.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A short proof of the modified Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner conjecture

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $\Phi_1, \Phi_2 : \mathbb{M}_d(\mathbb{C})\to \mathbb{M}_n(\mathbb{C})$ be two quantum channels with respective Stinespring isometries $V_1, V_2 : \mathbb{C}^{d}\to \mathbb{C}^{n} \otimes \mathbb{C}^{m}$ on any common dilation space $\mathbb{C}^{m}$. We prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on $\mathbb{C}^{m}$ such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond},$ thus resolving vom Ende's modification of the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner conjecture in the affirmative.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Geometric bias in eigenspace perturbation under random heterogeneous noise

arXiv:2606.11263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spectral methods rely fundamentally on the stability of principal eigenspaces under random perturbations. Classically, this stability is quantified by the Davis-Kahan and Wedin theorems, which bound the eigenspace error using the operator norm of the noise and the relevant spectral gaps. While these worst-case bounds are sharp for arbitrary deterministic perturbations, they can be wasteful in the low-rank signal-plus-random-noise setting, as they fail to capture the fine-grained interaction between the signal geometry and the noise distribution. In this paper, we study the spectral perturbation of signal-plus-noise matrices corrupted by sparse, random noise with an arbitrary, inhomogeneous variance profile. We demonstrate that under heterogeneous noise variances, the empirical eigenvectors suffer a systematic, deterministic geometric bias that is entirely invisible to classical perturbation bounds. By leveraging the Quadratic Vector Equation (QVE) and establishing fine-grained isotropic local laws, we derive near-optimal, non-asymptotic perturbation bounds for the leading eigenspaces in the operator and $2\to\infty$ norms. The bounds separate the usual signal-to-noise contribution, stochastic fluctuations, and structured geometric bias terms determined by the alignment between the signal eigenspaces and the row-wise variance profile.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Comparing Linear Probes with Mahalanobis Cosine Similarity

arXiv:2606.19603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear probes are widely used in interpretability research and often compared by cosine similarity. The Mahalanobis cosine similarity (MCS) between two directions, which reweights the inner product by test data covariance, is a natural task-aware refinement. Ying et al. (2026) report that a probe's MCS to a reference probe trained on the out-of-distribution (OOD) data near-perfectly linearly predicts the probe's OOD AUROC (R^2 = 0.98). Here, we extend this empirical finding across models, layers, and concept domains, and prove this general phenomenon in closed form: For balanced classes whose projections are Gaussian, OOD AUROC and MCS to the reference probe are linear because both are sigmoid-shaped functions of the probe's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the test data. The theory also predicts when this linearity fails, which we verify empirically. MCS offers a theoretically grounded and empirically effective alternative to Euclidean cosine similarity for comparing linear probes.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CRC-Screen: Certified DNA-Synthesis Hazard Screening Under Taxonomic Shift

Authors:

arXiv:2605.00074v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: DNA-synthesis providers screen incoming orders by searching the requested sequence against curated hazard lists. We show that this baseline collapses to a 100% false-flag rate when the hazardous sequence comes from a taxonomic family absent from the reference set: under Conformal Risk Control's certified miss-rate constraint, a low-discrimination signal forces the threshold below the entire test-benign mass. We compose three signals derived from a synthesis order's public annotation: $k$-mer Jaccard similarity to known toxins, the trimmed-mean score of a five-LLM judge panel, and cosine similarity to clustered embedding centroids. Fused under a monotone logistic aggregator and calibrated by Conformal Risk Control, the resulting screener certifies $\mathbb{E}[\mathrm{FNR}] \le \alpha + \mathrm{TV}$, where the additive term is the calibration-to-test distribution shift under family holdout (a certified ceiling of 24-49% across folds). Across ten leave-one-taxonomic-family-out folds at $\alpha=0.05$ on UniProt KW-0800 reviewed toxins, the calibrated screener achieves 0% empirical test miss rate on every fold and 0% test false-flag rate on nine of ten folds. The bound's finite-sample slack $1/(n_{\mathrm{cal}}+1)$ caps the certifiable miss rate at 1.77% on our 200-hazard subsample; reaching procurement-grade $\alpha=10^{-3}$ requires an $18\times$ larger calibration set, which the full reviewed UniProt KW-0800 corpus is large enough to deliver. The binding constraint on certifiable DNA-synthesis screening is calibration data, not algorithms. Code: https://github.com/najmulhasan-code/crc-screen

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

FlexPooling with Simple Auxiliary Classifiers in Deep Networks

In computer vision, the basic pipeline of most convolutional neural networks consists of multiple feature extraction layers, where the input signal is downsampled to a lower resolution in each subsequent layer. This downsampling process is commonly referred to as pooling, which is an essential operation in CNNs. Pooling improves robustness against transformations, reduces the number of trainable parameters, increases the receptive field, and lowers computation time. Since pooling is a lossy process but remains important for extracting high-level information from low-level representations, it is important to preserve the most prominent information from previous activations to improve network discriminability. Standard pooling is usually performed using dense pooling methods, such as max pooling or average pooling, or through strided convolutional kernels. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective adaptive pooling method, called FlexPooling, which generalizes average pooling by learning a weighted average over activations jointly with the rest of the network. We further show that attaching Simple Auxiliary Classifiers (SAC) to the CNN improves performance and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with standard pooling methods. Experiments on multiple popular image classification datasets show that FlexPooling consistently outperforms baseline networks, achieving approximately 1 to 3 percent improvement in accuracy.

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

Online Convex Optimization with Sublinear Noisy Probes

arXiv:2606.14640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) over a convex set $K\subseteq \mathbb R^d$, where in each round $t$ the learner selects $x_t\in K$ and then observes a convex loss $f_t:K\to[0,1]$, with the goal of minimizing regret to the best fixed decision in hindsight. We introduce a unified probing model that generalizes two recent lines of work: sublinear best-expert queries in the experts setting, and pairwise (comparison-based) feedback available every round in OCO. In our framework, the learner has a budget of $k\le T$ pairwise probes; on a probed round it may query two points and learn which one has smaller loss. Our main result shows that even a sublinear and noisy probe budget can provably improve worst-case regret in the full feedback OCO regime. With $k$ $\delta$-noisy pairwise probes, we obtain: $ Reg_T \le O\left(\min\left\{\sqrt{dT\ln T},\; \frac{dT\ln T}{k|1-2\delta|}\right\}\right) $, which is tight (up to logarithmic factors in $T$) across $T$, $k$ and $\delta$. Specifically regarding the noise parameter $\delta \in [0,1]$, the regret guarantee smoothly degrades as the oracle response approaches a coin flip, i.e., $\delta$ is close to $\frac{1}{2}$. When applying the same techniques to a finite $K$ for the prediction with $d$ experts setting, the resulting rates are instead completely tight in all parameters, including $d$. Our analysis gives a streamlined treatment of pairwise probing in OCO by quantifying the benefit of probing via a variance reduction effect, combined with a second-order (variance-based) analysis of Continuous Exponential Weights.

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

Agent-based models for the evolution of morphological alternation patterns

Why is the past of English "go" the apparently unrelated "went"? Such alternations are frequent in languages. They neither aid communication nor learnability, yet they can be persistent, surviving over centuries or millennia. We present a multi-agent simulation of the emergence of morphological stem and inflection alternations. Alternate forms arise by phonological changes or, as with "go/went", from lexical alternatives associated with a subset of the population. When an agent 'hears' another agent use a novel form for a slot in the paradigm of a word (say, the past tense of go), they will with some probability adopt that form, possibly spreading its use to other slots in the paradigm that shared the same original form. Thus alternative forms can spread through the population and become entrenched as stem or inflectional marker alternants. Unlike many previous computational studies, our system allows for naturalistic lexical forms, realistic phonological rules, lexicons with hundreds or thousands of entries, and agent populations in the tens or hundreds. It supports several network topologies, diffusion patterns and agent adoption policies. One issue with such simulations is evaluation: how realistic is the resulting morphology compared to those of real languages? We introduce the AI Historical Linguist, a novel Large Language Model-driven system that models a debate between two historical linguists. We use this to compare a set of real language morphologies, disguised morphologies, and experimentally evolved morphologies. The results suggest that among the factors that favor more plausible morphologies are scale-free social networks and random Bernoulli adoption of forms. We also present three case studies modeling attested historical changes, allowing us to test what might have happened if history had been different. All code and data are released.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

tap: A File-Based Protocol for Heterogeneous LLM Agent Collaboration

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing multi-agent software development systems have proposed many forms of agent collaboration, including role-based collaboration and automated code review. However, many systems assume a common runtime, a central conversation server, or the same API family. Under these assumptions, LLM agents from different vendors cannot easily exchange messages directly from their own execution environments while dividing development and review work on a shared codebase. This paper presents tap, a file-based collaboration protocol that allows Claude (Anthropic) and Codex (OpenAI) to collaborate on one codebase without shared memory or an identical runtime. The core of tap is a file-first design that preserves markdown files with metadata as original messages, combines a file inspection path (file communication, Tier 1) with real-time notification paths for Claude and Codex (real-time communication, Tier 2), and isolates work through separate git worktrees. Even if real-time notification fails or a receiver restarts, the message file remains available and the same content can be inspected again. In a 27-day, 37-generation self-applied operation where tap was used to develop and review itself, we collected 209 tap-related pull requests and 717 operational artifacts. An analysis of 375 review artifacts showed that the share of reviews recording at least one defect or requested change was 69.8% for heterogeneous model pairs and 53.1% for homogeneous model pairs. These results show that tap, which combines file-based message preservation with real-time notification, operates in a real production repository, and that combining heterogeneous models and execution environments can broaden review perspectives. tap is distributed as the open-source npm package @hua-labs/tap (v0.5.2).