Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12853

Candidate overtone shear horizontal SAW resonators in thin-film lithium niobate for intermodal acousto-optic modulation

Authors:

Wenbing Jiang↗Xuankai Xu↗Yu Guo↗Boyu Zhang↗Lihui Jin↗Xiao Chen↗Tao Wu↗Libing Zhou↗

arXiv:2606.12853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The merits of thin-film surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices are pivotal to develop the high-performance intermodal acousto-optic modulators. In this work, we have proposed shear-horizontal (SH) SAW resonators for anticipated intermodal acousto-optic modulation on the thin-film lithium niobate platform. Through optimization of the cut angle of LN films, the SAW wavelength, and the thickness of interdigital transducer (IDT) electrodes, the calculated acousto-optic overlap factors utilizing SH0 modes are improved by more than an order of magnitude compared with those of Rayleigh modes. Furthermore, we have fabricated and characterized three kinds of proof-of-principle SH0 mode devices without/with grating reflectors. The electromechanical coupling coefficients (keff^2) and quality factors (Q) in the overtone resonators with grating reflectors are systematically evaluated, featuring the highest Q of 843 with the compromised keff^2 of 0.96%-4.72%. The results reveal that the temperature coefficients of frequency (TCF) of Rayleigh modes vary across various overtones, whereas the SH0 modes exhibit TCFs in the range of 32.3-68.9 ppm/C. Our fabricated SH0-mode overtone resonators demonstrate the capability of operating at power levels up to 29 dBm without electrode damage, offering a promising paradigm for robust and high-efficiency intermodal acousto-optic modulators with potential applications in integrated optical signal processing, microwave photonics,and quantum information technologies.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19562

Advances in Scientific Machine Learning for Coupled Fluid Flow and Transport

Authors:

Gabriel F. Barros↗R\^omulo M. Silva↗Alvaro L. G. A. Coutinho↗

arXiv:2606.19562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This chapter reviews recent advances in Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) for modeling coupled fluid flow and transport phenomena governed by the incompressible Navier-Stokes and scalar transport equations. Such systems, found in applications like turbidity currents and thermal convection, feature strong nonlinear coupling and multiscale behavior that make high-fidelity simulations computationally expensive. To address this, the chapter surveys state-of-the-art SciML methods for building efficient surrogate models, including linear reduced-order techniques based on Singular Value Decomposition (such as Dynamic Mode Decomposition) and nonlinear neural network approaches like Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) and $\beta$-Variational Autoencoders ($\beta$-VAEs). It first covers the authors' work combining these models with High Performance Computing strategies, including Adaptive Mesh Refinement/Coarsening (AMR/C) and scientific floating-point data compression. It then presents two new contributions: surrogate modeling of turbidity currents via PINNs, and the extraction of disentangled nonlinear modes from thermal flows using $\beta$-VAEs. Governing equations and representative benchmarks, including lock-exchange flows and Rayleigh-Bénard convection, illustrate these methodologies. The chapter is intentionally long, covering both the mathematical and physical foundations of coupled fluid flow and the computational aspects of state-of-the-art modeling. Overall, it demonstrates how SciML enables fast, accurate approximations of complex coupled systems within the specific data regimes and modeling assumptions considered, while substantially reducing computational cost relative to full-order simulations. Broader capabilities such as real-time prediction and uncertainty quantification remain active research directions whose feasibility depends strongly on the problem at hand.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

03.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:7dfa5bfb4f75632db783f85e7e0083d7

Investigation of Intra-Fraction Stability and Inter-Fraction Reproducibility of Deep Inspiration Breath-Hold Across Two Hypofractionated Radiotherapy Regimens in the HYPORT Adjuvant Study.

Authors:

MAHATA↗Roy↗Khatua↗Maity↗Barik↗Chakraborty↗Chatterjee↗

Background: Deep Inspiration Breath Hold (DIBH) is a widely used respiratory motion management technique for minimizing cardiac dose in left-sided breast radiotherapy. In the Breast HYPORT Adjuvant study, DIBH was employed for cardiac sparing in patients without nodal irradiation using a standardized institutional protocol with the Varian Real-time Position Management (RPM) system. Both moderate-hypofractionation (control arm - 40Gy in 15 fractions) and one-week hypofractionation (experimental arm - 26 Gy in 5 fractions) regimens were delivered using this protocol. This study aimed to evaluate the robustness of DIBH by analyzing intra-fraction stability and inter-fraction reproducibility of breath-hold amplitude across the two treatment regimens. Methods: Respiratory waveforms acquired during each treatment session were analyzed to determine the median breath-hold amplitude and its standard deviation during beam delivery. Intra-fraction stability was assessed from vari- ations within individual treatment sessions, while inter-fraction reproducibility was evaluated relative to the simula- tion waveform amplitude across all treatment sessions. These parameters were compared between the two HYPORT regimens to examine breath-hold consistency during treatment delivery. Moreover, an additional comparison was made between the one-week hypofractionation regimen and the first five fractions of the moderate-hypofractionation regimen to evaluate the effect of treatment duration . Lung volumes from free-breathing and DIBH CT scans were analyzed to assess the effectiveness of patient breath-hold training. Results: Both arms demonstrated an average 1.7-fold increase of air volume in lung during the breath-hold position, confirming the effective implementation of DIBH during treatment planning and delivery. Structured training resulted in increased breath-hold amplitudes, with gains of 22.87% and 24.16% with respect to the first trial session in the experimental and control arms, respectively. Both regimens receive equivalent doses for approximately the same air volume in lung . Despite the different prescription doses in the two arms (26 Gy vs. 40 Gy), the experimental arm achieved an equivalent mean heart dose of 2.91% (75.6 cGy) compared with 2.95% (118.51 cGy) in the control arm, suggesting a similar cardiac preservation protocol adopted during treatment planning. Intra-fraction stability was similar between the control arm and the experimental arm, with median amplitude variations of 1.006 mm (95% CI: [0.998-1.015]) and 1.079 mm (95% CI: [1.067-1.097]), respectively. In contrast, inter-fraction reproducibility improved in the experimental arm, with lower deviation from simulation amplitude (0.44 {+/-} 0.24 mm vs. 0.66 {+/-} 0.25 mm) for the entire treatment schedule. The stability and reproducibility of experimental arm were further compared with the first five fractions of the control arm. The results were similar to those of the experimental arm. Conclusion: In this study, we compared two treatment regimens in terms of intra-fraction stability and inter-fraction reproducibility during DIBH radiotherapy. Both regimens demonstrated comparable intra-fraction stability, indicating effective motion management irrespective of treatment duration. However, the experimental arm showed better inter- fraction reproducibility, suggesting more consistent breath-hold performance throughout the treatment course. Based on stability and reproducibility, a reasonable narrowing of the DIBH gating window may be implemented with minor changes to the institutional protocol. The observed trend highlights the potential for improved consistency with the experimental approach and supports further investigation to better understand the underlying factors and strengthen these findings in future studies.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

04.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:7cbc1d15a0124de420954af06f63b3eb

The Unreliable Judges: Assessing Reproducibility and Self-Preference Bias of LLMs as Free-Text Evaluators

Authors:

Alvarez-Arenas↗J. I↗mananes↗jimenez-carretero↗Sanchez-Cabo↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming clinical practice and research, but their adoption requires rigorous evaluation. While human assessment is ideal, its cost has driven the widespread use of LLMs as evaluators. We introduce an open-source reciprocal framework comparing 71 human experts against six LLMs. AI evaluators show a strong self-preference bias, yet neither group reliably identified whether a response was human- or AI-generated. AI scores correlated with surface features such as length and lexical diversity, whereas human scores did not. By probing the evaluator's hidden states and applying targeted steering, we show that verbosity is a major causal driver of the bias. Moreover, shuffling question-response pairings shows that long responses keep high scores even when they no longer answer the question, whereas short ones do not, demonstrating that AI judges reward verbosity largely independently of content alignment. Finally, API-based and batch inference inflate stochasticity, underscoring the need for controlled deployment.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19950

Confidence Calibration for Multimodal LLMs: An Empirical Study through Medical VQA

Authors:

Yuetian Du↗Yucheng Wang↗Ming Kong↗Tian Liang↗Qiang Long↗Bingdi Chen↗Qiang Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.19950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great potential in medical tasks, but their elicited confidence often misaligns with actual accuracy, potentially leading to misdiagnosis or overlooking correct advice. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between accuracy and confidence in medical MLLMs. It proposes a novel method that combines Multi-Strategy Fusion-Based Interrogation (MS-FBI) with auxiliary expert LLM assessment, aiming to improve confidence calibration in Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA). Experiments demonstrate that our method reduces the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by an average of 40\% across three Medical VQA datasets, significantly enhancing MLLMs' reliability. The findings highlight the importance of domain-specific calibration for MLLMs in healthcare, offering a more trustworthy solution for AI-assisted diagnosis.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

06.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16 DOI: HASH:a7686f2fac943a029d8c371b1f65d83d

Reporting patterns of adverse drug withdrawal events using individual case safety reports in United States and European databases

Authors:

Khan↗Doherty↗A. S↗McCarthy↗Dalton↗Jungo↗K. T↗Reeve↗Moriarty↗

Introduction: Adverse drug withdrawal events (ADWEs) are a key safety concern with deprescribing but are infrequently reported in trials. Although pharmacovigilance systems have advanced our understanding of medication-related harms, it is unclear how extensively these systems have been used for ADWEs. Objectives: To examine the reporting patterns of ADWEs for all drugs recorded in United States and European pharmacovigilance databases between 2004 and 2023. Methods: A retrospective study was conducted using two pharmacovigilance databases, the publicly available FDA-FAERS dataset and EMA-EV Level 2A (individual-level) dataset. ADWE cases were identified using relevant MedDRA preferred terms. Data on patient characteristics, reporter type, drugs, indication, ADWE outcomes, dechallenge/rechallenge, seriousness criteria, time to onset, duration, and causality were summarised. Results: A total of 158,505 ADWE reports were analysed (FDA-FAERS: 145,514; EMA-EV: 12,987), with mean ages of 46.1 (FDA; 55.3% female) and 45.5 years (EMA; 57.1% female). The frequently reported drug classes were opioids (FDA: oxycodone, 29.8%; EMA: buprenorphine, 19%), antidepressants (FDA: duloxetine, 32%; EMA: venlafaxine, 25.9%) and gabapentinoids (FDA: pregabalin, 6.7%; EMA: pregabalin, 6.0%). The most common adverse outcomes were other serious medical conditions (FDA=63.9%; EMA=46.0%), hospitalisation (FDA=15.9%; EMA=28.3%), and disability (FDA=13.3%; EMA=6.2%) and these outcomes varied significantly based on sex and age group (p

Read & Discuss → View Source →

07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2512.22560

RollArt: Disaggregated Multi-Task Agentic RL Training at Scale

Authors:

Wei Gao↗Yuheng Zhao↗Tianyuan Wu↗Shaopan Xiong↗Weixun Wang↗Dakai An↗Lunxi Cao↗Dilxat Muhtar↗Zichen Liu↗Haizhou Zhao↗Ju Huang↗Siran Yang↗…

arXiv:2512.22560v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) trains LLMs through multi-turn interactions with environments, producing workloads that mix compute-bound prefill, bandwidth-bound decoding, CPU-heavy environment execution, and bursty reward evaluation. Existing systems either colocate all stages on a single GPU cluster or decouple them only at a coarse granularity, overlooking hardware heterogeneity and incurring substantial synchronization overhead across stages. We present ROLLART, a system for multi-task agentic RL on disaggregated infrastructure. ROLLART maps each pipeline stage to best-fit hardware, routing prefill-heavy tasks to compute-optimized GPUs, decode-heavy tasks to bandwidth-optimized GPUs, and environments to CPU clusters. It decouples rollout at the trajectory level, allowing generation, environment interaction, and reward scoring to proceed independently, so that slow or failed environments never block the others. ROLLART offloads stateless reward computation to serverless infrastructure and overlaps rollout with training via staleness-bounded asynchronous weight synchronization. Our results demonstrate that ROLLART effectively improves training throughput and achieves 1.31–2.05 \(\times\) training time reduction compared to various RL systems. We also evaluated ROLLART by training a hundreds-of-billions-parameter MoE model for Qoder product on an Alibaba cluster with above 3,000 GPUs, demonstrating its stability and scalability.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13818

Uncertainty Estimation and Generalization Bounds for Modern Deep Learning

Authors:

Luis A. Ortega↗

arXiv:2606.13818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This thesis investigates how Bayesian principles can deepen our understanding of modern deep learning systems. While neural networks achieve remarkable predictive performance, their ability to generalize and to quantify uncertainty remains only partly understood. This thesis approaches this challenge from both methodological and theoretical angles: unifying Bayesian inference, function-space modeling, and large-deviation theory under a common probabilistic perspective. On the methodological side, the thesis introduces the Deep Variational Implicit Process (DVIP), a scalable Bayesian framework that extends implicit processes to deep architectures. Complementing this, two post-hoc methods – the Variational Linearized Laplace Approximation (VaLLA) and the Fixed-Mean Gaussian Process (FMGP) – are proposed to equip pretrained deterministic networks with calibrated uncertainty estimates. The theoretical contributions focus on one of the central open questions in modern machine learning: why do large, over-parameterized neural networks generalize so well? To address this, the thesis develops a unified probabilistic framework that connects three key mechanisms – diversity, smoothness, and stochasticity – within the language of PAC-Bayesian and large-deviation theory.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.05461

Output Type Before Quality: A Standards-Derived XAI Admissibility Rubric for Autonomous-Driving Safety

Authors:

Abhinaw Priyadershi↗Mandar Pitale↗Jelena Frtunikj↗Maria Spence↗

arXiv:2606.05461v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safety standards for ML-based autonomous driving specify the kind of evidence an assurance case must contain (directed cause-and-effect chains, quantified interventional effects, named root-cause variables), yet the XAI literature is organised by output type and technique family (saliency maps, feature attribution, counterfactuals, causal graphs, language traces). SHAP, the most-recommended ADS XAI method, returns a ranked feature list that no implementation effort can convert into a directed chain (Fig.1). We name this mismatch the evidence-type gap. From AMLAS, ISO 26262, ISO21448, ISO/PAS 8800 we derive 19 testable evidentiary criteria across 7 lifecycle stages with representative clause-cited derivations and score six XAI method classes structurally. Causal XAI emerges as structurally required to satisfy the derived criteria at three stages: hazard identification (+62% rubric gap), incident investigation (+50%), and data management (+50%); the verdict set is stable across thresholds T in (0%, 50%]$ and survives a worst-case single-cell flip down to T = 25%. At the remaining four stages, correlational or language-based methods are comparable or sufficient. The rubric identifies structural admissibility (necessary but not sufficient for compliance): an admissible method's specific output content may still be wrong, and validating that fidelity (the edges a fitted SCM produces, the cause a trace names) is the open assurance challenge. A single-VLA proof of concept on 1,996 real-world driving clips (79,840 rows, ten splits) is consistent with each method's observed output type matching its rubric prediction. XAI method selection for ADS safety assurance should be driven by lifecycle-stage evidence demand, not by method popularity.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

10.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12 DOI: HASH:5a9a743a2ac5f8e6bf0ef4d6c10175de

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

Authors:

Addepalli↗V. r↗Rao↗Kiselica↗Kummerfeld↗Abdalnabi↗Lee↗

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.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2601.14031

Intermittent time series forecasting: local vs global models

Authors:

Stefano Damato↗Nicol\`o Rubattu↗Dario Azzimonti↗Giorgio Corani↗

arXiv:2601.14031v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Forecasting intermittent time series, which contain zeros, is a crucial challenge in supply chains as inventory policies require probabilistic forecasts to establish safety levels. Intermittent time series are commonly forecast using local models, trained individually on each time series. In the last years global models, trained on a large collection of time series, have become popular for time series forecasting. Global models are often based on neural networks or gradient boosted trees. We carry out the first study comparing state-of-the-art probabilistic local and global models on intermittent time series. For global models we consider three different distribution heads suitable for intermittent time series: negative binomial, hurdle-shifted negative binomial and Tweedie. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first use of the latter two with neural networks. We perform experiments on five datasets comprising overall more than 40'000 real-world time series. Among global models, TiDE, a simple neural network architecture, achieves the best accuracy; it also consistently outperforms local models and has lower computational requirements. Large global models are instead much more computationally demanding and less accurate. Among the distribution heads, the Tweedie provides the best estimates of the highest quantiles.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.20737

Repeated Shared Access Enables Grokking, but Edit Propagation Depends on an Addressable Memory

Authors:

Yanan Niu↗

arXiv:2606.20737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study factual edit propagation in a controlled synthetic knowledge-graph QA setting using a 2x2 grid that crosses loop recurrence with shared-memory access: a dense transformer (Dense), a looped transformer (Loop), a dense backbone with shared memory (Dense+Mem), and a looped backbone with shared memory (loop-memory coupling, LMC). The two factors dissociate. For learning, both routes to repeated shared access – looped recomputation and repeated memory rereading – cross the out-of-distribution (OOD) grokking barrier that Dense fails, so repeated shared access is the behavioral regularity, not a specific architecture. For editing, the substrates split along a different axis: applying a single localized factual edit (conditioned on direct success) and measuring 2-hop propagation on a shared pre-edit-correct set, the edit propagates strongly in both memory-bearing cells (LMC 0.78-0.92, Dense+Mem 0.71-0.96) and only weakly in the memory-free ones (Loop 0.04-0.30, Dense 0.00-0.03). The split is along the memory axis, not the loop axis: every memory-bearing seed exceeds every memory-free seed, with no detectable difference between the two memory cells. Crucially Dense+Mem has no recurrence, so the propagating ingredient is an addressable site that an edit can write to and later computation rereads, not loop recomputation; Loop is at best a partial intermediate. The affordance survives coarsening the store (N=128 to N=13): propagation attenuates but the memory/no-memory split persists, so fine granularity buys precision rather than the affordance itself. These results dissociate learning competence from editing affordance – repeated shared access suffices to grok, but edit propagation depends on whether the substrate exposes an addressable memory that the forward computation can write to and later reread, an affordance that loop recurrence provides only partially.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

13.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23822

Quantum turbulence in the many-body regime

Authors:

Sayak Bhattacharjee↗Mahendra K. Verma↗Alexander V. Balatsky↗Srinivas Raghu↗

arXiv:2606.23822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We discuss phenomenology associated with turbulent hydrodynamics in quantum fluids from a condensed-matter perspective. We begin with weakly-interacting superfluids, often modeled by a mean-field theory governed by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Considering the effect of quantum fluctuations beyond the mean-field approximation, we propose a study of many-body quantum effects in turbulent hydrodynamics, especially near zero temperature. We motivate examples of quantum many-body systems where such effects may be uncovered. These include bosons confined in a periodic potential in low spatial dimensions (one and two), and the associated quantum critical point of the superfluid-insulator transition, realized in present-day ultracold-atom and quantum computing platforms. We conclude by listing a set of (open) questions that may be answered using modern quantum many-body techniques. This article is part of the theme issue 'Frontiers of turbulence and statistical physics'.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.12670

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

Authors:

Xiangyi Li↗Yimin Liu↗Wenbo Chen↗Bingran You↗Zonglin Di↗Yifeng He↗Shenghan Zheng↗Kyoung Whan Choe↗Jiankai Sun↗Shuyi Wang↗Chujun Tao↗Binxu Li↗…

arXiv:2602.12670v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment large language model (LLM) agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark whose current inventory contains 87 tasks across 8 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Our latest aggregate evaluation runs the 87-task benchmark under matched no-Skills and curated-Skills conditions for 18 model-harness configurations. Curated Skills raise the average pass rate from 33.9% to 50.5% (+16.6 percentage points; 25.5% normalized gain), with configuration-level gains ranging from +4.1 to +25.7 pp. Focused Skills with at most three modules outperform larger or exhaustive bundles, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them. SkillsBench establishes paired evaluation as the foundation for rigorous measurement of Skill efficacy on agentic, expertise-heavy work.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19116

Towards an Agent-First Web: Redesigning the Web for AI Agents

Authors:

Eranga Bandara↗Ross Gore↗Ravi Mukkamala↗Asanga Gunaratna↗Safdar H. Bouk↗Xueping Liang↗Peter Foytik↗Abdul Rahman↗Sachini Rajapakse↗Isurunima Kularathna↗Pramoda Karunarathna↗Chalani Rajapakse↗…

arXiv:2606.19116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The World Wide Web was built on an assumption held for three decades: the primary consumer of web content is a human being. This permeates every layer; its access model presumes human visitors, its economics rest on human attention, and its content targets human perception. The rapid emergence of AI agents as intermediaries between humans and web content invalidates this assumption. Yet the web resists agents through blanket blocking, CAPTCHA-based exclusion, and economic models that treat agent access as extraction rather than legitimate interaction. This paper proposes a principled redesign across three layers. At the access layer, agents acting for humans should inherit equivalent access rights, governed by rate limiting and agent identification metadata in HTTP requests, analogous to browser headers, alongside a dual-layer architecture serving human-readable and agent-optimized content from the same domain. At the economic layer, we propose an intent-based tier framework grounded in the agent-as-human-proxy principle: an agent's economic obligation mirrors that of the human it represents. A token-based subscription model meters content in tokens rather than pageviews, alongside a commissioned content economy anchoring AI content production in human intentionality. At the content layer, we identify epistemic recursion, the self-referential loop in which AI-generated content is consumed by agents to produce further content, progressively detaching web knowledge from human ground truth. We propose the Agent Text Markup Language (ATML), a four-level human supervision tier model, and a cryptographic provenance chain to counter this threat. Together these constitute ten design principles for an agent-first internet, one in which agents are first-class citizens whose integration requires renegotiating the web's foundational social contract across access, economics, and content.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15665

Information Gap and Feasibility-Aware Inference in Binomial Logistic Mixtures

Authors:

Yuta Hayashida↗Shonosuke Sugasawa↗

arXiv:2606.15665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies the information gap between mixture detection and label recovery in binomial logistic mixtures. Standard likelihood-based criteria such as the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) can detect the presence of two components, but this does not guarantee that the corresponding labels are recoverable. We show that this gap is intrinsic to binomial logistic mixtures with a fixed number of trials: observed-data evidence for mixture structure and per-observation information for label recovery have different local orders in the component separation, and only the former accumulates with the sample size. As a result, there exists a detectable-but-unrecoverable regime in which BIC selects two components while the posterior labels remain essentially uninformative. To address this issue, we propose two feasibility-aware inference procedures: a recoverability-aware BIC with a posterior-entropy penalty and an entropy-regularized estimator that mitigates the tendency of the maximum likelihood estimator to produce overly separated components and overly concentrated posterior responsibilities. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted gap and demonstrate that the proposed methods avoid misleading component selections and improve the calibration of posterior label probabilities.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15417

From Frames to Temporal Graphs: In-Context Egocentric Action Recognition with Vision-Language Models

Authors:

Bessie Dominguez-Dager↗Francisco Gomez-Donoso↗Miguel Cazorla↗Marc Pollefeys↗Daniel Barath↗Zuria Bauer↗

Action reasoning in egocentric video requires capturing fine-grained transitions of hand-object interactions, a task where general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle when operating directly on raw pixels. We propose to decouple visual perception from symbolic reasoning by converting videos into Temporal Action Graphs. In a multi-stage prompting pipeline, we first generate dense natural language narratives over short temporal windows as a semantic bottleneck, then formalize them into structured, open-vocabulary graph representations. On the EGTEA and Epic-Kitchens-100 datasets, the symbolic representation unlocks efficient in-context learning: few-shot graph demonstrations yield substantial accuracy gains over zero-shot frame and graph-based inference alike. Even in the zero-shot setting, graph-based reasoning remains competitive with pixel-based inference despite potential pretraining contamination favoring the latter. Across 11 open-weight VLMs from 6 model families ranging from 2B to 235B parameters, our findings indicate that current VLMs are more effective as symbolic reasoners than as direct visual observers. By projecting video into the language domain, we provide a scalable, fine-tuning-free alternative to end-to-end approaches that better leverages these models' latent reasoning strengths. The code will be made public.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2504.11775

Discrimination-free Insurance Pricing with Privatized Sensitive Attributes

Authors:

Tianhe Zhang↗Suhan Liu↗Peng Shi↗

arXiv:2504.11775v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fairness has become an important concern in insurance pricing as insurers increasingly rely on machine learning models to predict expected losses. At the same time, regulatory and privacy constraints often restrict insurers' ability to access or use sensitive attributes such as gender or race. Recent actuarial research addresses fairness in this context through the concept of the discrimination-free premium, which removes both the direct and indirect effects of sensitive attributes while preserving actuarial consistency. However, implementing this approach typically requires access to the sensitive attributes themselves, which may not be available in practice. This paper studies the estimation of discrimination-free insurance premiums when sensitive attributes are observed only in privatized or noise-perturbed form. We consider a multi-party data setting in which insurers observe non-sensitive attributes and outcomes, while a trusted third party holds privatized sensitive attributes generated through a privacy mechanism. Within this framework, we develop statistical methods for estimating discrimination-free premiums using only the privatized attributes. We study two settings of practical relevance: when the privacy mechanism is known and when its noise level is unknown. For both cases, we establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed estimators. Numerical experiments and empirical applications demonstrate that the proposed approach enables fair insurance pricing while respecting privacy and regulatory constraints.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

19.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24242

Monitoring Beam Splitter Entanglement using Quantumness

Authors:

Hua-Li Chen↗Hsien-Yi Hsieh↗Chien-Ming Wu↗Ole Steuernagel↗Ray-Kuang Lee↗

arXiv:2606.24242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report on an experiment in which two independent squeezed vacuum states get entangled by mixing them with a balanced beam splitter. We follow standard practice and use an inseparability criterion to quantify their entanglement. However, this only allows us to witness the entanglement, but not to determine the deleterious effects of experimental imperfections due to the beam splitter mixing and the associated mode-mismatch and detection imperfections. We therefore introduce an alternative framework suitable for continuous variable systems using the states' quantumness, $\Xi$. We show that, under ideal circumstances, $\Xi$ is a conserved quantity under beam mixing. This allows us to benchmark the experiment's performance by comparing the states' quantumness $\Xi$ after the beam splitter mixing with $\Xi$ before. Such a comparison is not possible with entanglement witnesses, as the input states are unentangled. This highlights the main strength of our approach: its ability to generally quantify the quantumness of multi-mode continuous variable states and use this to probe different stages in an experiment.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2603.11479

Grammar of the Wave: Towards Explainable Multivariate Time Series Event Detection via Neuro-Symbolic VLM Agents

Authors:

Sky Chenwei Wan↗Yifei Y. Wang↗Tianjun Hou↗Xiqing Chang↗Aymeric Jan↗

arXiv:2603.11479v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time Series Event Detection (TSED) aims to localize semantically meaningful events in time series data, with critical applications in high-stakes domains. Unlike statistical anomalies, events are often defined by natural-language descriptions with internal temporal-logic structures across multiple physical channels. However, in real-world settings, dense event annotations are expensive to obtain, making purely supervised learning difficult. We introduce Language-guided TSED, a setting where a model is given textual event descriptions and must ground them to intervals in multivariate signals with little or no labeled data. To address this problem, we propose Event Logic Tree (ELT), a knowledge representation framework that converts linguistic descriptions into structured temporal logic over signal primitives. Building on ELT, we present SELA, a neuro-symbolic VLM agent framework that iteratively grounds primitives from signal visualizations and composes them under ELT constraints, producing both event intervals and faithful tree-structured explanations. We further release a real-world benchmark across energy and climate domains with expert knowledge and annotations. Experiments show that SELA improves over supervised fine-tuning and existing zero/few-shot time series reasoning baselines.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2605.08270

SAFformer:Improving Spiking Transformer via Active Predictive Filtering

Authors:

Zequan Xie↗Weiming Zeng↗Yunhua Chen↗Sichang Ling↗Tongyang Chen↗Jinsheng Xiao↗

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer notable advantages in biological plausibility and energy efficiency, making them promising candidates for building low-power Transformers. However, existing Spiking Transformers largely adhere to a passive reactive paradigm, which struggles to focus on task-relevant information and incurs substantial computational overhead when processing redundant visual data. To overcome this fundamental yet underexplored limitation, we propose SAFformer, a novel Spiking Transformer architecture based on an active predictive filtering paradigm. Inspired by the brain's predictive coding mechanism, SAFformer actively suppresses predictable signals and focuses on salient visual features. Extensive experiments show that SAFformer establishes new state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS. Remarkably, on ImageNet-1K, it achieves 80.44% Top-1 accuracy with only 26.58M parameters and an energy consumption of 5.88 mJ, demonstrating an exceptional balance between accuracy and efficiency.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2602.12753

Hierarchical Successor Representation for Robust Transfer

Authors:

Changmin Yu↗M\'at\'e Lengyel↗

arXiv:2602.12753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The successor representation (SR) provides a powerful framework for decoupling predictive dynamics from rewards, enabling rapid generalisation across reward configurations. However, the classical SR is limited by its inherent policy dependence: policies change due to ongoing learning, environmental non-stationarities, and changes in task demands, making established predictive representations obsolete. Furthermore, in topologically complex environments, SRs suffer from spectral diffusion, leading to dense and overlapping features that scale poorly. Here we propose the Hierarchical Successor Representation (HSR) for overcoming these limitations. By incorporating temporal abstractions into the construction of predictive representations, HSR learns stable state features which are robust to task-induced policy changes. Applying non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) to the HSR yields a sparse, low-rank state representation that facilitates highly sample-efficient transfer to novel tasks in multi-compartmental environments. Further analysis reveals that HSR-NMF discovers interpretable topological structures, providing a policy-agnostic hierarchical map that effectively bridges model-free optimality and model-based flexibility. Beyond providing a useful basis for task-transfer, we show that HSR's temporally extended predictive structure can also be leveraged to drive efficient exploration, effectively scaling to large, procedurally generated environments.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18439

RegimeVGGT: Layer-Wise Spatially Preserving Redundancy Removal for Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer

Authors:

Jinhao You↗Shuo Lyu↗Zhuohang Lyu↗Tanxuan Li↗Zibo Zhao↗Jiaxiang Hu↗Kai Tang↗Yichen Guo↗

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) recovers dense 3D scene structure from multi-view images in one forward pass, but quadratic cross-frame attention limits its scalability. Existing training-free accelerators reduce computation uniformly along one axis, missing layer heterogeneity. Our spectral, probing, and causal analyses reveal three regimes: shallow layers lack cross-view structure, middle layers drive cross-view alignment, and deep layers are redundant for dense geometry yet their cross-frame attention remains essential for pose. RegimeVGGT applies layer-wise U-shaped compression along two axes: Saliency-Guided Banded Merging protects geometry- and edge-salient tokens, while Selectively Protected K/V Downsampling preserves cross-frame spatial coverage and the pose-critical path through a phase-shifted spatial grid, a reference-frame anchor, and uncompressed camera/register tokens. Training-free, RegimeVGGT achieves a 6.7x speedup over VGGT* at matched reconstruction quality.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24074

Token Complexity of Certifying Stochastic-Oracle Reliability

Authors:

Jie Wang↗

arXiv:2606.24074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wang[Wang2026] introduced the Stochastic-Oracle Turing Machine (SOTM) framework and defined token complexity as the minimum expected cost of interacting with a stochastic oracle needed to attain a specified solution quality for a task. This paper develops an analogous notion for certifying the reliability of a stochastic oracle on a given domain. Certification token complexity is the minimum expected token cost required, with controlled error probability, to distinguish oracles that meet a target reliability level from those that fall below a lower reliability threshold. We construct an SPRT-based certification SOTM that queries the oracle, computes binary correctness scores, and stops when the accumulated log-likelihood evidence crosses a decision threshold. The SOTM halts almost surely, satisfies the desired two-sided error guarantee over the reliability regions to be certified, and yields an explicit upper bound on certification token complexity in terms of the reliability thresholds, the error bound, and the expected per-turn token cost. We then establish a matching information-theoretic lower bound: even with adaptive queries, every error-bounded certification SOTM must incur the same leading-order expected token cost as the SPRT-based construction as the prescribed error bound tends to zero. Together, these bounds characterize the leading-order certification token complexity in the small-error regime.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24000

Cyclic Denoising Reveals Ultrastable Memories in Diffusion Models

Authors:

Rishabh Sharma↗Stefano Martiniani↗

We introduce cyclic denoising – repeated forward and reverse diffusion at controlled noise amplitudes – as an extraction attack for image diffusion models. Inspired by random organization in disordered solids, cyclic denoising exposes regions of the learned distribution that are largely inaccessible to standard sampling. The dynamics drive samples toward attractors with a broad stability spectrum. The deepest attractors are ultrastable: they regenerate after near-total corruption and persist through thousands of noising-denoising cycles. Many of these attractors correspond to memorized training images, including stock photographs, brand watermarks, and web-crawl artifacts. The attack requires only sampler-level control, with no gradients, weight inspection, prompts, captions, or prior knowledge of the training data. Unlike generate-and-filter attacks, which rely on large-scale prompted generation and post-hoc similarity or membership-inference filtering, our main protocol is fully unconditioned. We demonstrate the phenomenon in Stable Diffusion v1.4 and in a pixel-space DDPM, showing consistent behavior across latent- and pixel-space diffusion models. Across noise amplitudes, we observe a yielding-like transition: low-amplitude cycling produces trivial absorbing fixed points or limit cycles, while larger amplitudes induce rearrangements, basin hopping, and long-lived trapping in structured memorized attractor basins. We also observe hierarchical partial absorption, prompt-stabilized basins, and cross-initial-condition universality of the recovered attractor set. Our results therefore show that cyclic denoising is both a physics-inspired probe of generative landscapes and a practical tool for memorization auditing, with implications for privacy, copyright compliance, and model fingerprinting.

Read & Discuss → View Source →