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) 2026-06-24

Reentrant value fields as delayed coupled reaction-diffusion systems on finite graphs

arXiv:2605.03940v4 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We describe a dynamical system in which a symbolic field is coupled to a geometric field via a bipartite Hilbert-Schmidt kernel. The system is fully described by a retarded functional differential equation (RFDE) on the history space, subject to Lipschitz and small gain conditions. We show that the RFDE is well-posed under constant input and that it admits a compact global attractor. The principal subsystem $(H_L, X_R, P)$, which is comprised of the two primary fields as well as an executive field, is shown to be globally stable independent of delay, provided that the interfield coupling satisfies $C_{\mathcal{K}}^2

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Barriers and facilitators to diabetes management among adults and healthcare providers in a peri-urban Ugandan health facility: A qualitative study

Diabetes mellitus is an increasing public health challenge in Uganda and other low- and middle-income countries, where health systems face growing demands for chronic disease care. Although quantitative studies have documented poor glycemic control and health system constraints, less is known about how patients and healthcare providers experience diabetes management in peri-urban public health settings. This study explored barriers and facilitators to diabetes management among adults with diabetes mellitus and healthcare providers at a peri-urban health facility in Uganda. We conducted a qualitative descriptive study at Kasangati Health Centre IV, Wakiso District, Uganda, between February and March 2025. Data were collected through 15 in-depth interviews with adults living with diabetes mellitus and 8 key informant interviews with healthcare providers involved in diabetes care. Participants were purposively selected based on their experience with diabetes management and service delivery. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, translated where necessary, and analyzed using a hybrid inductive-deductive thematic approach informed by the Theoretical Domains Framework. Five interrelated themes were identified: (1) institutional and environmental factors influencing access to diabetes care; (2) cognitive and informational factors influencing medication adherence; (3) social influences on diabetes management; (4) emotional experiences of patients and healthcare providers; and (5) self-management strategies and continuity of care. Across these themes, participants identified barriers including resource limitations, communication challenges, medication management difficulties, stigma, emotional distress, and weak follow-up systems. Facilitators included peer support, religious and community networks, health education, provider flexibility, and patient-developed adherence strategies. Diabetes management was influenced by interacting health-system, social, informational, and behavioural factors. Resource constraints, limited health literacy, stigma, and weak follow-up systems hindered effective management, while social support, health education, and patient self-management strategies facilitated continued engagement in care. Interventions that strengthen chronic care services, patient education, and community support may improve diabetes outcomes in similar resource-constrained settings.

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

Thinking with Visual Grounding

arXiv:2606.16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) can produce natural-language reasoning traces, these traces often leave the supporting image regions implicit, making them hard to verify and difficult to supervise. We introduce visually grounded thinking, a reasoning process in which models interleave natural-language thoughts with explicit point or box groundings of the visual evidence used at each step. This lets the model express intermediate reasoning in language while grounding key objects in the image regions they refer to. To train this behavior, we construct a scalable synthesis pipeline that distills correct visual reasoning traces, extracts the visual objects required by the traces, grounds them with a SAM3-based agent, and derives aligned point and box supervision from the resulting masks. We further propose grounding-aware reinforcement learning, which combines answer correctness rewards with dense grounding rewards that score whether generated object references match the correct image evidence. Across two counting benchmarks and four spatial reasoning benchmarks, adding visually grounded thinking to Gemma3-4B-IT consistently improves performance over the original model and the non-grounded thinking baseline. On spatial reasoning, the visually grounded thinking 4B models match, and in some cases surpass, Gemma3-27B-IT from the same model family. Our analysis shows that point grounding is well suited to counting, while box grounding benefits most from explicit grounding rewards on spatial tasks. Overall, our results show that VLMs think better when their intermediate thoughts are tied to the image regions that make them true.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

TopoCast: A Topological Fidelity Framework for Evaluating Transformer-Based Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.25439v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in Time Series Forecasting (TSF), yet their evaluation remains dominated by pointwise error metrics such as Mean Squared Error (MSE), which quantify numerical accuracy but overlook structural properties of the forecast signal, including recurrent dynamics, oscillatory behavior, and phase alignment. As a result, forecasts exhibiting over-smoothing, phase shifts, or frequency distortions may achieve favorable error scores despite substantial structural degradation. To address this limitation, we propose TopoCast, a topology-driven framework for evaluating structural fidelity in TSF. TopoCast reconstructs phase-space representations of forecast and ground-truth sequences using Takens delay embedding and applies persistent homology to characterize their intrinsic dynamics. We derive four complementary topological fidelity measures from persistence diagrams and aggregate them into a Topological Fidelity Score (TFS). We further introduce dominant cycle overlap, a novel metric that maps persistent topological features to the temporal domain to assess whether dominant oscillatory patterns occur at the correct time points. Combined with TFS, this yields the Localized Topological Fidelity Score (LTFS), a phase-aware measure that captures temporal localization errors invisible to existing evaluation metrics. Experiments on five Transformer architectures across three real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that models with similar forecasting errors can exhibit markedly different structural fidelity profiles, revealing failure modes overlooked by conventional evaluation and highlighting the value of topology-aware forecast assessment.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Conformal Risk-Averse Decision Making with Action Conditional Guarantee

arXiv:2606.05551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable decision making pipelines powered by machine learning models require uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods that come with explicit safety guarantees. Conformal prediction provides such UQ by wrapping ML predictions into prediction sets, and recent work by Kiyani et al. (2025b) established that these sets can be translated into optimal risk-averse decision policies – yet only inheriting marginal safety guarantees. We generalize and strengthen their results by (i) introducing action-conditional conformal prediction, which yields safety guarantees conditioned explicitly on each action taken by the decision maker, (ii) showing that action-conditional prediction sets serve as a proxy for the feasible decision space for risk-averse decision makers aiming to optimize action-conditional value-at-risk, and (iii) proposing a principled finite-sample algorithm based on pinball-loss minimization, connecting the framework of Gibbs et al. (2025) to action-conditional guarantees. Experiments on two real-world datasets confirm that our approach significantly improves action-conditional performance over conformal baselines.

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

CODA-BENCH: Can Code Agents Handle Data-Intensive Tasks?

Advanced agents are increasingly demonstrating the potential to operate as autonomous engineers, creating a growing demand for evaluation benchmarks that capture the complexity of real-world development. Such environments typically involve both complex code and large-scale data (i.e., file system). However, existing benchmarks usually evaluate code-centric or data-centric capabilities in isolation, leaving a clear gap with real development scenarios. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing CODA-BENCH, the first benchmark to jointly evaluate code and data intelligence in a data-intensive environment. We construct a data-intensive Linux sandbox based on the Kaggle ecosystem (containing hundreds of datasets), where agents must actively explore complex file hierarchies to identify relevant resources and generate code for data-driven analytical tasks. CODA-BENCH comprises 1,009 tasks spanning 31 communities, with each task environment containing an average of 980 files, simulating realistic data scale and noise. Evaluations of advanced agents reveal that even top-performing systems struggle to effectively integrate data discovery with code execution, achieving a success rate of only 61.1%. These results highlight a substantial gap in current agentic capabilities for data-intensive tasks and point to promising directions for future research.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

EvalStop: Using World Feedback to Detect and Correct Reward Overoptimization in Multi-Tenant RLHF Platforms

arXiv:2606.04145v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cloud LLM fine-tuning platforms increasingly serve RLHF workloads, where a learned reward model is optimized as a proxy for human quality. As Gao et al. (2023) showed, this proxy diverges from world feedback (downstream eval metrics) under sustained optimization pressure, a phenomenon known as reward overoptimization. Existing platform schedulers ignore this divergence: non-clairvoyant schedulers optimize JCT without any quality signal, SLAQ-style quality-aware schedulers use training loss (a weaker proxy that drops monotonically through hacking), and classical per-job early stopping requires human monitoring and does not free shared GPUs. We propose EvalStop, a composable scheduling primitive that terminates jobs on k consecutive eval-score declines, releases GPUs, preserves the best checkpoint, and delegates to any base scheduler. We frame scheduler-level early stopping as a detection problem and evaluate it in a discrete-event simulator whose RLHF workload mixes reward-hacking and structurally healthy runs, with ground-truth labels hidden from schedulers. On RLHF-heavy workloads (80% RLHF, 64 GPUs), EvalStop achieves precision 98% / recall 99% / FPR 1.5% while improving JCT by 9% and cutting wasted compute by 22% over SRTF-Est (p

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Sorting Algorithms to Scalable Kernels: Bayesian Optimization in High-Dimensional Permutation Spaces

arXiv:2507.13263v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a powerful tool for black-box optimization, but its application to high-dimensional permutation spaces is severely limited by the challenge of defining scalable representations. The current state-of-the-art BO approach for permutation spaces relies on an exhaustive $\Omega(n^2)$ pairwise comparison, inducing a dense representation that is impractical for large-scale permutations. To break this barrier, we introduce a novel framework for generating efficient permutation representations via kernel functions derived from sorting algorithms. Within this framework, the Mallows kernel can be viewed as a special instance derived from enumeration sort. Further, we introduce the Merge Kernel , which leverages the divide-and-conquer structure of merge sort to produce a compact, $\Theta(n\log n)$ to achieve the lowest possible complexity with no information loss and effectively capture permutation structure. Our central thesis is that the Merge Kernel performs competitively with the Mallows kernel in low-dimensional settings, but significantly outperforms it in both optimization performance and computational efficiency as the dimension $n$ grows. Extensive evaluations on various permutation optimization benchmarks confirm our hypothesis, demonstrating that the Merge Kernel provides a scalable and more effective solution for Bayesian optimization in high-dimensional permutation spaces, thereby unlocking the potential for tackling previously intractable problems such as large-scale feature ordering and combinatorial neural architecture search.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Can Trustless Agents Be Trusted? An Empirical Study of the ERC-8004 Decentralized AI Agent Ecosystem

arXiv:2606.26028v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As autonomous AI agents increasingly transact across organizational boundaries, a fundamental trust challenge emerges: how can an agent assess whether an unknown counterpart is trustworthy? The ERC-8004 protocol addresses this challenge with the first permissionless trust layer for AI agent economies, built around three on-chain registries for Identity, Reputation, and Validation. Despite its rapid adoption, the protocol has not been studied empirically, leaving it unclear whether the information it records provides a trustworthy basis for decision-making. To address this gap, we present the first empirical study of ERC-8004 across three chains: Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain (BSC), and Base, covering the period from protocol deployment through May 13, 2026. We crawl on-chain Identity and Reputation events, off-chain files, and x402 payment transactions. On the identity side, we find that most registrations are placeholders rather than active agents, with only a small fraction (3%, 4%, and 15% across Ethereum, BSC, and Base) exposing a valid ERC-8004 registration file with at least one live service endpoint. On the reputation side, we show that the Registry, as currently deployed, cannot function as a trust signal: values are not commensurable, feedback records are rarely grounded in verifiable interactions, and reputation can be manipulated at minimal cost. Consistent with these design weaknesses, we find that a substantial fraction of reviewers (73.6%, 59.2%, and 90.6% across Ethereum, BSC, and Base) exhibit coordinated Sybil behavior. After removing Sybil-flagged feedback, 15.5%, 72.3%, and 89.4% of rated agents, respectively, are left with no valid feedback. We then turn these findings into concrete recommendations for future revisions of ERC-8004. Our study yields actionable protocol-design implications and establishes an empirical baseline for research on AI agent markets.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

AGE-MIL: Anchor-Guided Evidence Learning for Patient-Level Prediction

Existing computational pathology methods predominantly operate within whole-slide image (WSI)-level multiple instance learning (MIL) paradigms, while patient-level modeling remains underexplored. In routine pathological practice, however, pathologists derive diagnostic and prognostic conclusions by integrating evidence across multiple WSIs rather than relying on any single slide. This discrepancy creates a fundamental misalignment when patient-level supervision is directly imposed on conventional MIL frameworks, often leading to unstable optimization and degraded predictive reliability. To address this issue, we propose Anchor-Guided Evidence MIL (AGE-MIL), a weakly supervised framework for patient-level prediction. AGE-MIL constructs a patient-level anchor from slide representations to capture global pathological context and guide the retrieval and integration of diagnostically relevant local patches, enabling robust patient-level modeling. Patient-level risk is further modeled as an evidence accumulation process, promoting stable optimization under weak supervision. AGE-MIL is evaluated on six clinically relevant patient-level prediction tasks from two independent cohorts. Experimental results show that the proposed framework consistently outperforms eight state-of-the-art MIL methods. Code is available at https://github.com/wodeniua/AGE-MIL.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Locally Gentle State Certification for High Dimensional Quantum Systems

arXiv:2602.04550v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard approaches to quantum statistical inference rely on measurements that induce a collapse of the wave function, effectively consuming the quantum state to extract information. In this work, we investigate the fundamental limits of locally-gentle quantum state certification, where the learning algorithm is constrained to perturb the state by at most $\alpha$ in trace norm, thereby allowing for the reuse of samples. We analyze the hypothesis testing problem of distinguishing whether an unknown state $\rho$ is equal to a reference $\rho_0$ or $\epsilon$-far from it. We derive the minimax sample complexity for this problem, quantifying the information-theoretic price of non-destructive measurements. Specifically, by constructing explicit measurement operators, we show that the constraint of $\alpha$-gentleness imposes a sample size penalty of $\frac{d}{\alpha^2}$, yielding a total sample complexity of $n = \Theta(\frac{d^3}{\epsilon^2 \alpha^2})$. Our results clarify the trade-off between information extraction and state disturbance, and highlight deep connections between physical measurement constraints and privacy mechanisms in quantum learning. Crucially, we find that the sample size penalty incurred by enforcing $\alpha$-gentleness scales linearly with the Hilbert-space dimension $d$ rather than the number of parameters $d^2-1$ typical for high-dimensional private estimation.

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

Point-Identification of a Robust Predictor Under Latent Shift with Imperfect Proxies

arXiv:2603.15158v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Addressing the domain adaptation problem becomes more challenging when distribution shifts across domains stem from latent confounders that affect both covariates and outcomes. Existing proxy-based approaches that address latent shift rely on a strong completeness assumption to uniquely determine (point-identify) a robust predictor. Completeness requires that proxies have sufficient information about variations in latent confounders. For imperfect proxies the mapping from confounders to the space of proxy distributions is non-injective, and multiple latent confounder values can generate the same proxy distribution. This breaks the completeness assumption and observed data are consistent with multiple potential predictors (set-identified). To address this, we introduce latent equivalent classes (LECs). LECs are defined as groups of latent confounders that induce the same conditional proxy distribution. We show that point-identification for the robust predictor remains achievable as long as multiple domains differ sufficiently in how they mix proxy-induced LECs to form the robust predictor. This domain diversity condition is formalized as a cross-domain rank condition on the mixture weights, which is substantially weaker assumption than completeness. We introduce the Proximal Quasi-Bayesian Active learning (PQAL) framework, which actively queries a small, targeted set of diverse domains that satisfy this rank condition. PQAL can recover the point-identified predictor, demonstrates robustness to varying degrees of shift and outperforms previous methods on synthetic data and semi-synthetic dSprites, IHDP, ACS Folktables datasets.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Libra: Efficient Resource Management for Agentic RL Post-Training

arXiv:2606.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a standard post-training paradigm for shaping large language models (LLMs) into capable agents. In agentic RL, the rollout stage generates trajectories while invoking tools, producing long-tailed and non-stationary workloads that expose two fundamental challenges in resource management. First, due to the long-tail distribution, a small fraction of trajectories dominates rollout makespan. Second, rollout and training are subject to cross-stage imbalance, as they exhibit strong asymmetry in compute patterns, memory demands, and sensitivity to sequence length. Compounding this asymmetry, the sequence length distribution drifts continuously as the policy evolves, rendering any static resource split progressively suboptimal. We present Libra, a resource management system to address both challenges via two core mechanisms. The first is a global resource planner that jointly optimizes GPU allocation across rollout and training clusters. It leverages an elastic hybrid pool to enable lightweight, non-blocking worker reallocation between stages. The second is a causality-driven multi-level feedback queue (C-MLFQ) scheduler, which routes requests to heterogeneous rollout buckets based on causal signals derived from tool-return outcomes, rather than relying on fragile length predictions. Evaluated on 48 A800 GPUs, Libra achieves up to 3.0x higher throughput and converges up to 2.5x faster in reward compared to the baselines.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Pigeonholing: Bad prompts hurt models to collapse and make mistakes

While in-context learning is generally shown to be effective in Large Language Models (LLMs), bad contexts can cause performance degradation and mode collapse, a phenomenon we call "pigeonholing." **Unintentionally bad** contexts can happen without malicious jailbreaking intents: For example, a user asks the model to justify an incorrect math theorem or fails to correct the model's buggy code. Specifically, we investigate ``pigeonholing" in two scenarios: (1) when the user suggests a solution, and (2) when the conversation context includes the assistant's previous (incorrect) responses. Our experiments across 10 verifiable and open-ended tasks with 10 different models show that pigeonholing manifests in several ways: (1) repeating the incorrect answers from context (leading to 38-40% performance drop), (2) converging on a narrow set of answers in coding and text generation without exploring alternatives, and (3) flipping stance on controversial topics to align with the user or the assistant's previous claims. We find that pigeonholing worsens almost monotonically with the number of conversation turns (performance drops by additional 14+% as repeated mistakes increase from 1 to 5), and pigeonholing-induced mode collapse can happen even when the provided example is correct. As a step toward mitigation, we propose RLVR with synthetic errors which improves models by 43-60% under bad contexts compared to vanilla RLVR baselines.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Probabilistic representation and classical solutions of wave equations with complex polynomial nonlinearities

arXiv:2606.18919v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We review the probabilistic representation of solutions of wave equations with polynomial nonlinearities in spatial dimensions d=1,2,3 using stochastic branching processes. Under regularity assumptions on the initial data, we derive conditions ensuring the integrability of the corresponding Monte Carlo estimator, and the existence and smoothness of mild and classical solutions. We also present numerical results and comparisons with grid-based algorithms for the solution of nonlinear wave equations.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

The Correctness Illusion in LLM-Generated GPU Kernels

arXiv:2606.20128v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarks for LLM-generated GPU kernels (KernelBench, TritonBench, GEAK) score correctness through fixed-shape, small-sample allclose-style checks. The number of inputs varies between benchmarks. The shape, dtype, and tolerance are fixed for each kernel. We test that oracle empirically. We construct a controlled corpus of 24 Triton and CPU stand-in kernels (15 correct controls and 9 LLM-style buggy variants seeded with documented transcription errors) and re-evaluate it under op-schema-aware seeded fuzzing with a high-precision (fp64) CPU reference and per-(op, dtype) absolute tolerances. The seeded oracle flags 9 of 9 buggy kernels and passes 15 of 15 correct controls, at zero precision cost on controls. We extend the corpus to 26 ops (adding a flash-attention pair) and re-run the same protocol on five GPU classes (RTX 3060, A10, L40S, A100 SXM4, H100 NVL). The verdicts are identical across all five GPUs: 10 of 10 illusions caught and 16 of 16 controls clean. The corpus result is about LLM-style transcription bugs that the allclose-on-one-shape oracle certifies as correct, not about the bug rate of any specific deployed LLM. Every flagged failure replays byte-for-byte from a stored seed.

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

G$^3$VLA: Geometric inductive bias for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606.24472v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have made rapid progress in generalist robot manipulation by harnessing semantic knowledge from pretrained vision-language backbones, but their visual tokens remain grounded in 2D image coordinates rather than the calibrated geometry of the robot's cameras – a mismatch especially pronounced in multi-camera setups, where views are coupled by known intrinsics and extrinsics yet processed as independent images. We propose G$^3$VLA, a camera-aware geometric module that injects calibrated structure into the visual-token stream of a pretrained VLA without altering its action space or imitation objective, combining intrinsic-conditioned ray embeddings, projective positional encoding (PRoPE), and bidirectional cross-view fusion. Geometric supervision is provided either from ground-truth point maps when available, or from confidence-gated $\pi^3$X teacher predictions, requiring no depth sensors or manual annotations. Instantiated on $\pi_0$, G$^3$VLA yields consistent gains across the LIBERO suites, RoboCasa24, RoboTwin2.0, and real-robot settings, with the largest improvements on spatially and object-sensitive tasks. We further validate on $\pi_{0.5}$ and GR00T 1.5, with results suggesting that geometric transfer is most effective when geometry-aware tokens have direct access to the action generation pathway. Our project page is at https://sites.google.com/view/g3vla

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Mathematical Forum Platform for Collaborative Problem Solving and Dataset Generation for AI Reasoning

arXiv:2606.12976v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sharing mathematical content in online forums remains a significant friction point for students and educators: writing raw LATEX is error-prone, standalone optical character recognition tools require platform switching, and current forum software offers no integrated path from a photograph of a formula to a rendered post. We present a unified system that eliminates this friction by embedding an image to LATEX conversion pipeline directly inside a forum posting interface. A user uploads or captures an image of a mathematical expression; the system routes it through the Mathpix OCR API, detects whether the returned output is LATEX or plain text containing inline math, applies the appropriate delimiter normalisation, and renders a live preview in either LATEX or Markdown mode before the post is committed to the database. The architecture is organized in three loosely coupled layers: image processing, rendering, and storage, and supports both desktop and mobile clients. A provisional US patent application has been filed covering the core methods. We describe the full system design, each component in detail, the data schema, and the key technical innovations, and we position the work against existing standalone tools and forum platforms to demonstrate the practical gap it closes. Beyond immediate usability, we argue that a deployed platform of this kind constitutes a continuously growing, community-validated dataset of mathematical problems and step-by-step solutions, a resource that can be used to train and benchmark AI systems for accurate mathematical reasoning

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

When Certainty Is an Artifact: Keyword Lexicon Blindness and the (Mis)Measurement of Rhetorical Stance

Authors:

Can a statistically significant, large-effect-size finding in computational social science be entirely an artifact of the measurement instrument? We present a case where the answer appears to be yes. Analyzing 85 interviews across four public intellectuals (2016–2026), we find a robust negative-affect/emphatic-certainty lexical co-occurrence pattern under keyword-based scoring ($r = 0.72$–$0.93$, $p < 0.01$ for all four speakers). Replacing keyword counting with LLM-based zero-shot semantic classification on the complete diarized corpus (32,625 sentences) dramatically reduces this correlation: Dalio's $r = 0.851$ drops to $r = 0.206$, with two speakers showing negative $r(neg, emphatic)$ and one showing null. In contrast, the LLM reveals a strong negative-hedging coupling across speakers – Rogoff's $r(neg, hedged) = 0.875$ ($p = 0.001$) and Zeihan's $r(neg, hedged) = 0.722$ ($p = 0.008$) – consistent with the conventional expectation that pessimistic discourse attracts hedging, not certainty. Sentence-level error analysis traces this discrepancy to three structural failure modes in keyword lexicons – syntactic blindness, polysemy blindness, and categorical absence – illustrated through cases where keyword counting inverts semantic meaning (e.g., ''never absolutely totally confident'' scored as high-certainty). We argue that keyword lexicons measure a universal lexical co-occurrence tendency – negative discourse naturally attracts emphatic vocabulary – that is orthogonal to, and can systematically invert, rhetorical stance. Treating keyword counts as measurements of epistemic certainty is a category error: a finding that appears to be about a speaker's psychology may be entirely about the counting of words.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

BindEdit: Taming Attention Leakage for Precise Multi-Object Image Editing

Real image editing enables precise manipulation of visual content, yet existing methods often fail in complex multi-object scenarios, causing semantic blending, object duplication, or incomplete edits. We attribute these failures to attention leakage, where signals across spatial regions and text tokens become entangled during the denoising process. Specifically, we identify two distinct forms of leakage: Edit-Token Leakage, where ambiguous token-region alignment leads to object blending, and Source Dominance Leakage, where tokens of unchanged source objects overwhelm the attention intended for target entities. To resolve these leakages, we propose BindEdit, which enforces attention-level constraints within a single diffusion trajectory. To suppress Edit-Token Leakage, BindEdit jointly regularizes cross- and self-attention so that each target token group is bound to its corresponding spatial region while maintaining instance-level separation. To suppress Source Dominance Leakage, a cross-attention re-balancing mechanism amplifies target token influence and attenuates residual source semantics within editable regions. Moreover, a region fidelity term ensures that each target concept is expressed coherently across the entire editing mask. Additionally, we propose a comprehensive multi-object benchmark encompassing diverse object counts and categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BindEdit consistently outperforms existing methods within a single diffusion trajectory, maintaining robust performance across both single- and multi-object editing scenarios.

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

DEEPRUBRIC: Evidence-Tree Rubric Supervision for Efficient Reinforcement Learning of Deep Research Agents

Deep research agents synthesize long-form reports by searching and reasoning over retrieved evidence. Reinforcement learning with rubric-based rewards improves these agents by optimizing them against checkable criteria that translate report quality into reward signals, but its efficiency depends on whether those criteria reliably capture the task scope and evidence needs. Most existing studies ask an LLM to generate rubrics for a given query, but when the model fails to infer the underlying information needs, the generated rubrics may be incomplete and reduce RL efficiency. To obtain more reliable query–rubric supervision, we introduce DeepRubric, a data construction framework that reverses this process: instead of inferring evaluation criteria for a given query, it first determines what an evidence-backed report should be evaluated on and then synthesizes aligned query–rubric pairs from those evaluation targets. Starting from a sampled seed topic, DeepRubric builds an evidence tree by recursively expanding evidence-backed sub-questions, whose leaves serve as atomic and verifiable evaluation targets. It then uses the evidence tree to synthesize the training query and rubrics, ensuring that the reward evaluates exactly the information requested by the query. Using DeepRubric, we construct 9K query–rubric supervision examples and train DeepRubric-8B with rubric-based GRPO, achieving comparable performance to prior open state-of-the-art deep research models across three benchmarks with roughly 13x fewer RL GPU-hours.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Daily Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2020) scoring reveals diet quality patterns masked by aggregation

The Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2020) is conventionally computed by aggregating intake across days before scoring. Digital food logging enables an alternative: scoring each day and averaging daily scores. These methods are not equivalent. The HEI's density-based structure and component caps cause aggregation to inflate adequacy scores when intake is irregular. Using Food & You data, we show daily HEI correlates more strongly with microbiome diversity, and recommend co-reporting both metrics.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Silent Failures in Physics-Informed Neural Networks: Parameter Poisoning and the Limits of Loss-Based Validation

arXiv:2606.25151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) embed governing equations in their loss function, enabling mesh-free solutions to partial differential equations. Low training loss is treated as evidence that the learned solution is physically correct. This paper shows that assumption breaks down when encoded physics are incorrect. By perturbing PDE parameters before training, a setting we describe as physics parameter poisoning or parameter misspecification, we produce models that train to low loss but give incorrect answers; we treat the perturbation schedule as sensitivity analysis rather than only as a security threat, and none of our claims requires an adversary. Achieving low residual loss does not discriminate accurate from inaccurate solutions: poisoned models reach losses at or below the clean baseline yet differ by large margins, so driving the residual down is not evidence of physical accuracy. Across three PDE systems (Burgers equation, Navier-Stokes cavity, and convection-diffusion), poisoned models match or beat the clean-model training loss while their solutions differ by up to 71% in the fixed sweep and up to 128% under adversarial search; at Cavity Re=400 the poisoned loss falls below the clean baseline. We define a detection difficulty ratio R (solution error divided by training loss) to summarize how invisible the corruption is, though cross-PDE comparison is complicated by differences in loss scale. We test six candidate defenses, none of which reliably detects corruption across all regimes. We propose a post-hoc defense: sweeping the PDE residual loss across parameter values without retraining. The loss minimum recovers the true training parameter without external data, and generalizes across all three PDE systems. The effect holds across five network architectures (8.7K to 133K parameters), is bidirectional, and is confirmed across multiple random seeds.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Anti-Platelet Factor 4 Antibody Clonal Heterogeneity and MGUS Status in HIT

Background Monoclonal gammopathy of thrombotic significance (MGTS) is a recently described chronic prothrombotic condition characterized by monoclonal anti-PF4 antibodies that are detected above the polyclonal antibody background in patient sera (i.e. present as monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance, MGUS). Due to conflicting data in the published literature on antibody clonality in heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT), we evaluated clonality and abundance of anti-PF4 antibodies in HIT, including investigating whether an MGUS, if present in HIT, represents the causative anti-PF4 antibody. Methods Blood samples from 15 patients with HIT were subject to Platelet Factor 4-dependent antigen-based and functional tests. The unmanipulated serum antibody repertoire and isolated anti-PF4 antibodies were subjected to mass spectrometric evaluation. Results Two of the 15 HIT patients had an IgG MGUS. Notably, anti-PF4 antibodies were not synonymous with the MGUS antibody in either of the two patients. Eight of the 15 patients demonstrated monoclonal anti-PF4 antibodies, however, none of the anti-PF4 antibodies were detectable as an MGUS upon evaluation of the entire serum antibody repertoire, reflecting their low abundance. In the seven patients with multiple anti-PF4 antibodies, non-monoclonality was confirmed by analysis of deglycosylated antibody heavy chains. Conclusions Anti-PF4 HIT antibodies are monoclonal in approximately 50% of HIT patients, however, antibody abundance is low such that they are not detectable over the polyclonal IgG background (i.e. are MGUS-negative), differentiating HIT from MGTS. This observation helps explain the transient nature of HIT relative to the persistent prothrombotic state seen in MGTS.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Quickest Detection of Hallucination Onset: Delay Bounds and Learned CUSUM Statistics

Authors:

Token-level hallucination detectors are evaluated as classifiers, by AUC over all tokens, yet a streaming monitor is judged by its reaction time: the number of tokens that pass between the onset of a hallucination and the alarm. We formulate hallucination onset detection as a quickest change detection problem. A first-order Markov model of the latent faithful/hallucinated state, validated on RAGTruth, places the task inside classical change-point theory and yields Lorden's lower bound on detection delay: about 1.3 tokens at a false-alarm rate of 0.01. We then show that a causal recurrent labeler acts as a CUSUM with a learned increment; at a matched false-alarm rate it detects in 11-13 tokens, against 31 for a linear per-token baseline, and a controlled decomposition attributes most of this advantage to a better per-token score rather than to temporal accumulation. An information-rate optimality theorem of Donsker-Varadhan type explains the remaining order-of-magnitude gap: the learned score realizes only 1/4.5 of the divergence the features carry, a deficit that recalibration cannot remove, with the remainder a finite-horizon effect. Classification metrics conceal this delay structure; sequential analysis makes it measurable