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.LG) 2026-06-18

MetaboNet-Bench: A Multi-modal Benchmark for Glucose Forecasting in Type 1 Diabetes

arXiv:2606.18640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Glucose forecasting algorithms are an important aspect of glycemic control management in type 1 diabetes. So far, the research community has developed numerous algorithms and models for forecasting. However, it is well-recognized that the lack of standardized model performance evaluation benchmarks makes fair comparison difficult and hinders further innovation, and thus benchmark standardization is in urgent need. Furthermore, many published glucose forecasting algorithms are limited to CGM data alone, ignoring other multimodal signals such as insulin dosing and carbohydrate intake. Here, we introduce MetaboNet-Bench, a benchmark for multimodal glucose forecasting for patients with type 1 diabetes that provides an extensible open-source evaluation framework for comparison of glucose forecasting algorithms that leverage glucose, insulin, and carbohydrate data. We then demonstrate its utility by benchmarking several recently published glucose forecasting models and a custom multimodal time-series model, representing different model architectures. The results show that the benefit of adding data modalities is conditioned on the complexity of the model and that incorporating more clinical metrics helps identify meaningful gaps to fill for future research.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A Unified Approach to Beta Moments, Combinatorial Identities, and Random Walks

arXiv:2605.05420v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of random walks has increasingly been popular across diverse disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, quantum physics, where they are used to model paths consisting of successive random steps in a mathematical space. A fundamental quantity of interest is the probability that a simple symmetric random walk returns to the origin after 2n steps. In this paper, we develop a unified probabilistic approach that connects the return probabilities in arbitrary dimensions with moment representations. Using this framework, we provide probabilistic proofs of several combinatorial identities involving beta and gamma functions, and derive new combinatorial identities in general dimensions.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Fully Differentiable Neural Forced Alignment via Soft Dynamic Programming

Recent advances in sequence modeling have significantly improved ASR systems, bringing them close to human-level recognition accuracy and enhancing robustness across diverse acoustic conditions and languages. In contrast, Forced Alignment has not experienced comparable progress, and traditional HMM-GMM frameworks remain widely adopted and highly competitive. To address this gap, we propose an end-to-end, fully differentiable neural architecture specifically designed for phoneme alignment. The model consists of an encoder that processes the input signal and a decoder that produces alignment decisions. The encoder is structured into two complementary branches: one dedicated to phoneme identity verification and the other to phoneme boundary detection. The decoder is implemented as a trainable module based on differentiable soft dynamic programming. The entire system is optimized end-to-end using a novel contrastive loss that encourages clear separation between steady-state phoneme regions and transition boundaries. The proposed approach outperforms the current state of the art in phoneme alignment on hand-annotated English benchmarks, achieves strong word-level generalization results, and demonstrates generalization on unseen languages.

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

Beyond Averaging in John Ellipsoid Approximation: High-Accuracy Algorithms in the Leverage-Score Model

arXiv:2606.20082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The John ellipsoid of a symmetric polytope $P=\{\mathbf{x}\in\mathbb{R}^d:\|\mathbf{A}\mathbf{x}\|_\infty\le1\}$, $\mathbf{A}\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, is computed by a long line of leverage-score algorithms, from Cohen, Cousins, Lee and Yang (COLT 2019) to its successors [WY24, CLS+25], all reaching a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation in $\Theta(\varepsilon^{-1}\log(n/d))$ iterations. We separate this complexity into three costs the modern line conflates (certification, identification, and accuracy) and locate the historical $\varepsilon^{-1}$ in the first alone. In the equivalent D-optimal-design form $\min_{\mathbf{p}\in\Delta_n}-\log\det(\sum_i p_i\mathbf{a}_i\mathbf{a}_i^\top)$, the leverage-score oracle is exactly the first-order oracle and the $(1+\varepsilon)$-John guarantee the Frank-Wolfe gap $g(\mathbf{p})\le\varepsilon d$; through this dictionary the costs come apart. The $\varepsilon^{-1}$ is a certification artifact: the uniform average of the iterates, the certificate used throughout the line, has gap exactly $\Theta(1/T)$, however cheap each iteration is made. Pointed instead at the last iterate the same oracle is fast: a warm-started accelerated method reaches the guarantee in $C(\mathbf{A})+O(\sqrt{\kappa}\log(1/\varepsilon))$ queries after an $\varepsilon$-independent setup $C(\mathbf{A})$, and once the optimal face is identified the facial problem is an unconstrained self-concordant minimization whose Hessian the oracle recovers exactly, so damped Newton needs only $O(\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ steps, for a total of $C(\mathbf{A})+O(d^2\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ queries. The accuracy dependence is thus doubly logarithmic after an $\varepsilon$-independent, condition-dependent setup; the open problem is the remaining identification cost (a condition-free bound on reaching the optimal face) and lower bounds. Accuracy is not the obstruction.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

On the Oracle Complexity of Interpolation-Based Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.19878v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work on first-order optimizers for empirical risk minimization (ERM) has suggested that smoothness of ERM loss functions in the training data, rather than in the optimization parameters, can be leveraged to improve the oracle complexity of gradient descent (GD) methods. In this paper, we propose an inexact gradient method, piecewise polynomial interpolation-based gradient descent (PPI-GD), which approximates the full gradient in each iteration by querying the first-order oracle at equidistant points in the data domain to construct polynomial interpolants of the resulting gradient samples over appropriately sized patches of the data domain. We analyze the oracle complexity of PPI-GD for strongly convex and non-convex loss functions when the data space dimension is bounded by a polylogarithmic function of the number of training samples, and find it to outperform several GD variants in key regimes when the loss function is sufficiently smooth. Furthermore, our analysis extends several techniques from the error analysis of bicubic spline interpolants to the setting of $d$-variate tensor product polynomial interpolants which may be of independent interest in interpolation analysis.

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

LLM Doesn't Know What It Doesn't Know: Detecting Epistemic Blind Spots via Cross-Model Attribution Divergence on Clinical Tabular Data

arXiv:2606.19509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to structured clinical data, yet whether they can recognize the limits of their own knowledge on such tasks remains unexplored. We study this question through the lens of cross-model attribution divergence with the goal of reducing epistemic uncertainty for structured tasks, comparing Qwen 2.5 7B and XGBoost on a prediction task via attribution divergence analysis. We report four findings. First, LLM verbalized confidence is epistemically vacuous, it outputs a near-constant (0.856-0.937) regardless of whether accuracy is 49% or 75.3%, tracking prompt format rather than prediction quality. Second, the LLM exhibits an inverse difficulty effect: accuracy drops to 64.8% when XGBoost is 99% correct, but matches XGBoost (73.8% vs. 73.1%) when it is moderately uncertain. Third, few-shot examples and SHAP-derived feature evidence are orthogonal, super-additive interventions: they reduce the Attribution Disagreement Score (ADS) from 1.54 to 0.38 and improve accuracy from 49% to 75.3% without training. Fourth, a cross-model calibrator that determined LLM reliability using attribution divergence signals reduces expected calibration error from 0.254 to 0.080, replacing uninformative verbalized confidence with patient-specific reliability estimates, without accessing model internals or requiring repeated inference. We frame these findings as a cold start problem for LLMs on structured data and outline a path toward genuine epistemic self-awareness.

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

Possible or Definite? A Benchmark for Evaluating Diagnostic Uncertainty Preservation in Clinical Text

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for clinical text tasks such as summarization and revision. While most studies evaluate the fluency and coherence of LLM-generated text, whether LLMs correctly preserve diagnostic uncertainty remains underexplored. In clinical practice, phrases such as ``possible pneumonia'' communicate the strength of available evidence and directly guide decisions about follow-up testing and treatment. Altering these uncertainty expressions can change the clinical meaning entirely. In this paper, we systematically evaluated this problem in two steps. First, we constructed a benchmark of 1,200 clinical documents with 9,184 uncertainty annotations across five levels. Second, we evaluated three LLMs on this benchmark. Our results show that (1) LLMs preserve the original uncertainty cues poorly, often less than half the time; (2) LLMs struggle with nuanced distinctions between adjacent levels. This work reveals a failure mode not captured by standard evaluation metrics and provides implications for the safe deployment of LLMs in clinical workflows.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Physics-Driven Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Isotropic 3D Fluorescence Microscopy under Undersampled Acquisition

Three-dimensional (3D) imaging represents the development of next generation of fluorescence microscopy. However, routine axial down-sampling makes isotropic resolution unrealistic. Here, we propose DeepUI, a physical zero-shot framework designed to achieve isotropic 3D fluorescence images from a low axial sampling rate. DeepUI fully leverages the intrinsic characteristics of 3D images through physics-guided degradation, which incorporates spatial-frequency joint learning to generate a scaled optical transfer function, combined with noise degradation and an up-sampling branch. Typically requiring just 5 minutes for training and 0.5 minutes for high-throughput and fast prediction, we demonstrate the superior performance of DeepUI to get isotropic results, and the exclusivity to axial down-sampling conditions, even in more challenging conditions, including defocused background, noise, and resolution blur.

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

Trust-Region Diffusion Policies for Massively Parallel On-Policy RL

arXiv:2606.15260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with massively parallel simulations has become a standard framework for developing robust, deployable policies; however, most existing approaches still rely on simple Gaussian policy parameterizations. Diffusion models provide a more expressive policy class and have shown strong performance on challenging control problems, yet most diffusion-based RL methods are designed for offline or off-policy training. In this work, we ask whether diffusion policies can be trained effectively in the massively parallel, on-policy regime. To this end, we introduce Trust-region Diffusion Policies (TruDi), which enables diffusion policies for on-policy RL with massively parallel simulations. This setting is particularly challenging because the data distribution changes quickly across updates, making stable training with complex policies difficult. TruDi addresses this by integrating a trust-region optimization rule to enforce a KL-divergence constraint over the entire diffusion trajectory. Empirically, we evaluate TruDi on a diverse set of 4 massively parallel RL benchmarks comprising a total of 73 tasks. Across these tasks, TruDi consistently outperforms or is on-par with strong baselines on standard tasks and achieves clear gains on more challenging humanoid control tasks, establishing a strong new baseline for massively parallel on-policy RL.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

trAIt: Species-by-Trait Data Retrieval using Large Language Models

Biological research often requires information about species' traits. Manual literature collation can be time-consuming and miss parts of the literature. To address this gap, we developed trAIt, a publicly available software for the retrieval of characteristics of species from scientific literature catalogued in the Europe PubMed Central (PubMed) database. trAIt provides a graphical user interface in which users specify species and characteristics of interest. Leveraging a large language model (LLM), trAIt retrieves relevant papers, combines their content through a consensus-based summarization model, and outputs a species-by-characteristic table. For a case study involving frog species, trAIt recovered 47.1% of trait-species combinations in 2.75 hours, while an expert curator independently recovered 62.4% over months. The consensus-based summarization substantially aids accuracy compared to single-source extraction. Across three case studies of vertebrate taxa, an expert confirmed the accuracy of 70.9% of trait-species entries recovered by trAIt. We observed considerable variation across taxa in trAIt's accuracy, which is possibly due to heterogeneity in open-access literature availability and inconsistencies in species and trait terminology. In sum, our analysis suggests that LLM-based tools can accelerate biological data synthesis but should be used to support domain experts' research, rather than replace their judgment.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

The censored stochastic six-vertex model and parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials

arXiv:2606.12670v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a censored version of the stochastic six-vertex model. We show that for parameters $b_1 < b_2$, this model started from the initial condition ${1}_{x>0}$ is stochastically dominated at any time by the blocking measure. This is a partial analog of the censoring inequality for monotone spin systems. In particular, this result allows us to control the behavior of second-class particles. The proof uses parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials, whose appearance is explained using a connection between the stochastic six-vertex model and the Iwahori–Hecke algebras of symmetric groups. Furthermore, we find an intertwining relation for this process using normalized parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials as an intertwining kernel.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Cardiometabolic risk phenogroups from a data-driven classification with expanded risk factors

Background and Aims Current diagnostic criteria for metabolic syndrome (MetS) may inadequately capture underlying metabolic heterogeneity and associated cardiovascular risks. We aimed to use expanded cardiometabolic variables to identify new cardiometabolic phenogroups with relevance to prognosis and risk stratification. Methods Latent class analysis (LCA) was applied to a discovery cohort (RESET; n=1,034), using the six conventional MetS measures and eight additional variables. A decision tree model was constructed using the most important variables to enable practical phenogroup classification and facilitate external validation. External validation was conducted in three independent cohorts, PICMAN (n = 120), UK Biobank (n = 344,817), and CHARLS (n = 12,145), analysing for proteomic signatures and cardiovascular outcomes. Results Five latent phenogroups were identified in the discovery cohort: Metabolically Preserved with and without isolated hypertension (each n=244; 23.6%), Lean-Insulin Resistant (IR) (n=140; 13.5%), Obese-Insulin Sensitive (IS) (n=211; 20.4%), and Obese-IR (n=195; 18.9%). Lean-IR and Obese-IS showed discordant adiposity and insulin/glycemic status, and a low prevalence of MetS (21.4% and 31.3%, respectively), whereas MetS was high (75.9%) only in the Obese-IR group. A decision tree model using four binary indicators (visceral adiposity, IR, elevated SBP, and HbA1c) accurately classified individuals into the five latent phenogroups and was subsequently deployed for external validation. Validation in PICMAN showed significantly higher liver fat (Mean 9.0% [SD 6.3%]) in Lean-IR versus Metabolically Preserved (Mean 2.8% [SD 1.8%], P=0.002). Plasma proteomic analyses further reflected unique metabolic-inflammation signatures across the 5 groups. Validation in the UK Biobank showed significant association between the latent phenogroups with outcomes of myocardial infarction and stroke. Hazard ratios for the composite outcome after adjusting for age and sex were 1.52 (95% CI, 1.43-1.61) for isolated hypertension, 1.86 (1.75-1.98) for Lean-IR, 1.85 (1.75-1.97) for Obese-IS, and 2.75 (2.56-2.95) for Obese-IR, compared with the Metabolically Preserved group. Conclusion Expanded cardiometabolic risk factors reveal metabolic heterogeneity obscured by current MetS criteria. Incorporating visceral adiposity and IR into a novel classification system refines cardiovascular risk stratification for the management of cardiometabolic disease.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Automatic identification of diagnosis from hospital discharge letters via weakly supervised Natural Language Processing

Identifying patient diagnoses from hospital discharge letters is essential for large-scale cohort selection and epidemiological research, but traditional supervised approaches require extensive manual annotation, which is often impractical for large textual datasets. We present a weakly supervised Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline for classifying Italian discharge letters without document-level manual annotation. The method extracts diagnosis-related sentences, generates semantic embeddings using a transformer model further pre-trained on Italian medical documents, and applies a two-level clustering procedure to derive weak labels that are then used to train a document-level classifier. The approach was evaluated in a case study on bronchiolitis using 33,176 discharge letters of children admitted to 44 emergency rooms or hospitals in the Veneto Region, Italy, between 2017 and 2020. The best weakly supervised model achieved an AUROC of 77.68% ($\pm4.30\%$), an AUPRC of 73.13% ($\pm4.93\%$), and an F1-score of 78.14% ($\pm4.89\%$) against manually annotated data. Performance surpassed unsupervised baselines and approached fully supervised models, while reducing the need for manual annotation by more than 1,500 hours for a dataset of this size. Similar model rankings were observed in a secondary validation on a smaller bronchitis dataset (3,188 discharge letters, 2020-2025), where the best weakly supervised model achieved an AUPRC of 76.72% ($\pm 5.02\%$). These results suggest the potential of weakly supervised NLP methods for scalable disease identification from clinical discharge letters.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

HPV Self-Sampling in Cervical Screening: A Rapid Review

Introduction Cervical cancer is the fourth largest cause of cancer deaths in women. HPV self-sampling could increase uptake of cervical screening. This rapid review aimed to determine the accuracy, concordance, uptake and acceptability of self-sampling over clinician-collected samples in high income countries. Method We followed Cochrane Rapid Reviews Methods. Top-up of 4 systematic reviews and meta-analyses was performed. Narrative data synthesis was conducted and meta-analysis where applicable. Databases searched were MEDLINE, EMBASE, CENTRAL and clinical trial registries. Risk of bias was assessed using AMSTAR 2, QUADAS, the Cochrane Risk of Bias (RoB), or the Nudelman and Otto, 2020 tool, depending on the study type. Findings The review included 39 studies for accuracy, 38 studies for concordance, 37 uptake and 48 studies for acceptability. Self-sampling has similar accuracy as clinician-collected samples when PCR-based assays are used. The overall agreement of self-sampling and clinician-collected samples was 87.1%(95%CI;85.6-88.6) with a kappa value of 0.70(95%CI;0.67-0.73). Mail-to-all strategies had higher uptake with participation differences of 11.3%(95%CI:8.4-14.2) in the intention-to-treat analysis and 7.7%(95%CI:4.7-10.8) in the per protocol analysis. Self-sampling is acceptable to non-attendees (91%(95%CI;85.3-94.6). Conclusion and Recommendation Self-sampling shows good performance on the four clinical effectiveness indicators of accuracy, concordance, uptake and acceptability.

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

Neither Parallel Nor Sequential: How DiffusionGemma Actually Commits Tokens

arXiv:2606.14620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open diffusion language models are marketed as parallel, non-autoregressive decoders, yet the order in which a shipped checkpoint actually commits its tokens is almost never measured. We instrument DiffusionGemma 26B, a masked discrete-diffusion mixture-of-experts model built on Gemma 4, hooking its sampler's accept step to record which canvas positions commit, when, and at what confidence. Across a 686-prompt, six-regime probe suite we find that its decoding is neither parallel nor block-autoregressive: it follows a partial left-to-right commit bias whose apparent strength depends almost entirely on the granularity at which you look. Order is weak token by token and strengthens smoothly as the analysis is coarsened, so the model's "block size" turns out to be an artifact of the measuring ruler rather than the architecture. The model commits in large simultaneous batches, leaving much of the within-batch order genuinely undefined rather than merely unobserved. The behaviour is regime-dependent: structured JSON is committed in essentially arbitrary order, and a position's commit confidence tracks correctness on mathematical reasoning but carries no signal on factual recall. Commitment is aggressive, finishing in a short late burst well inside the step budget, while task accuracy matches the model's autoregressive Gemma-4 sibling. Beyond these findings, our central contribution is methodological: measuring decoding order honestly demands handling trailing-EOS padding, within-regime confounding, commit non-monotonicity, block-size sensitivity, and large commit-batch ties, each of which can otherwise manufacture a decoding-order result that is not really there.

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

HiST: A Hierarchical Sparse Transformer for Cross-Modal Spatial Transcriptomics Modeling

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) links gene expression with tissue morphology but remains expensive and low-throughput, motivating surrogates that infer expression from routine histology. Whole-slide H&E-to-ST inference pairs a gigapixel image with gene measurements at a sparse, irregular set of locations, making multiscale modeling challenging without incurring dense-grid overhead or quadratic token mixing. We propose HiST, a hierarchical sparse transformer that treats measured locations as a lattice-indexed sparse field and builds a dyadic encoder–decoder directly on the active tissue footprint. HiST combines sparse window attention for local geometric correspondence with resolution-changing operators for rapid multiscale context integration. For a fixed window size, the dominant runtime and memory scale with the number of observed locations rather than the dense slide area. To mitigate slide-specific acquisition variation, HiST adds a bottlenecked global conditioning pathway via a slide calibration token that summarizes slide-level context and conditions local representations. On a multi-organ benchmark spanning diverse tissues and acquisition sources, HiST improves predictive performance over recent baselines while reducing runtime and peak memory.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Robust Privacy: Inference-Stage Privacy through Certified Robustness

arXiv:2601.17360v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adversary observing a model's released prediction can infer sensitive attributes of the queried input, or even reconstruct representatives of the model's training data. The inference interface thus acts as a side channel for privacy leakage. We introduce Robust Privacy (RP), an inference-stage privacy notion inspired by certified robustness: if a model's prediction is provably invariant within a radius-R neighborhood around an input x with confidence at least $1-\alpha$, then x enjoys $(R,\alpha)$-Robust Privacy, under which we prove that any adversary observing the released prediction has at most $\alpha/2$ advantage in distinguishing x from any input within distance R of x. Building on RP, we formalize Robust Attribute Privacy (RAP), an attribute-level privacy notion that characterizes the set of sensitive-attribute values that remain compatible with a released prediction. On a classification task, RP increases the median length of the RAP-compatible inference interval from 23.50 to 29.96, reducing attribute-inference precision. Model inversion attacks, often treated as a training-stage threat, in fact rely on fine-grained signals leaked through the inference interface; RP masks these signals at the inference stage, reducing attack success rate (ASR) from 73% to 4% on a black-box inversion attack. This direct targeting of the leakage channel enables RP to dominate DP-SGD and randomized response in the privacy-utility tradeoff space: RP retains 98.4% accuracy at 21% ASR, whereas DP-SGD must drop accuracy to 61.7% to reach a comparable ASR. Across both experiments, increasing the smoothing sample size N strengthens privacy and improves utility together. Finally, we examine model distillation as a scope boundary and show that RP mitigates attribute-level and instance-level inference-stage privacy leakage, but not function-level extraction through model distillation.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Feasibility-driven QAOA with penalty scheduling

arXiv:2606.25117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most available quantum algorithms address constrained optimization problems by treating constraints as soft penalty terms within a QUBO formulation. This approach requires careful adjustment of the penalty coefficients, which scales poorly with the number of constraints and lacks a proper strategy to balance feasibility and solution quality. In this work, we introduce two extensions of standard linear-ramp QAOA (lr-QAOA) tailored to problems with multiple heterogeneous constraints. We first construct $\Lambda$-lr-QAOA, in which each penalty term is assigned its own linear-ramp schedule, promoting penalty weights from external hyperparameters to internal variational parameters of QAOA, similarly to the objective and mixer parameters. By optimizing all schedules jointly in a single run, this approach eliminates nested penalty tuning and scales more efficiently to multiple constraints. The optimization is guided by a feasibility-driven loss function that pushes the quantum state towards high-quality feasible solutions. As a further refinement, we introduce piecewise-ramp QAOA, in which the linear ramps are replaced by two-segment piecewise schedules, enhancing the expressiveness of the Ansatz at the cost of a small parameter overhead independent of the circuit depth. We benchmark both methods on Earth-observation satellite mission planning tasks formulated as budget-constrained Maximum Weight Independent Set problems. Numerical results show that piecewise-ramp QAOA consistently outperforms lr-QAOA and $\Lambda$-lr-QAOA across circuit depths and system sizes. Furthermore, both $\Lambda$-lr-QAOA and piecewise-ramp QAOA exhibit a high feasibility rate, which is crucial in industrial applications. Our analysis highlights an intrinsic feasibility-optimality trade-off, which we address by introducing a filtered variant of the loss providing a single hyperparameter to tune this balance.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Weight-Space Geometry of Offline Reasoning Training

arXiv:2606.23740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement-learning losses (RFT, RIFT, DFT, Offline GRPO, DPO) are widely used to distill reasoning from large teachers into smaller students, and are typically compared on downstream accuracy alone. We ask whether they are mechanistically distinct or converge to a similar weight update. Training six methods (SFT, RFT, DFT, RIFT, Offline GRPO, DPO) on identical math rollouts from a single base model (Qwen3-4B) with attention-only LoRA, we analyze the resulting deltas via cosine similarity, principal-angle subspace analysis, linear mode connectivity, and CKA. We observe: (i) SFT, RFT, and RIFT have nearly colinear weight deltas (cosine >= 0.97, top-1 principal angle ~7 deg median over 144 modules) and comparable GSM8K accuracy (87-88%, n=1319; pairwise McNemar p >= 0.15); (ii) DFT diverges further in direction than any reward-weighted method despite using the same data; (iii) Offline GRPO adds a substantial component orthogonal to the SFT direction (~67% globally, up to ~86% in late layers) while staying in the SFT loss basin; (iv) DPO sits in a near-orthogonal subspace, shows a mode-connectivity barrier, and collapses late-layer CKA to ~0.46. DPO also reaches the highest accuracy in our protocol on both GSM8K (93.5%, McNemar p < 10^-9 vs. each other method) and AIME26 (30.0% vs. 3.3-10.0%); its training uses a 10x smaller learning rate than the others (the standard convention), so the update-norm and accuracy gaps reflect loss-function and optimizer choices jointly, and a learning-rate-matched DPO comparison is left for future work.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Velocity Prediction in Automatic Guitar Transcription

arXiv:2606.24912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) models have achieved a high level of success in polyphonic transcription of various instruments. Velocity, typically a measure of note intensity, is less commonly predicted in these models due to the absence of velocity labels in available datasets and lack of a proper definition for instruments other than piano. We present a methodology and model for velocity prediction in Automatic Guitar Transcription (AGT) which uses virtual instruments to generate synthetic training data with velocity labels. We first pretrain a model on this synthetic data. These weights are then transferred to a different model and trained on real guitar audio, allowing the model to retain the working velocity prediction while also achieving high performance and generalisability from the real training data. The velocity prediction is shown to outperform a baseline model which does not use the pretrained velocity weights, when evaluated on synthetic data. In addition, using the pretrained velocity weights offers a small improvement in note transcription, though the magnitude of this improvement is limited and not always significant depending on the testing data. Overall the model achieves results comparable to the state of the art in guitar transcription, while also successfully predicting velocity.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Static Endpoints: Tool Programs as an Interface for Flexible Agentic Web Services

arXiv:2606.19992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the agentic web era, LLM-based agents increasingly invoke web services as tools, yet most interfaces remain static endpoints that poorly express long-horizon workflows with loops, conditionals, joins, and retries. We present ToolPro, which represents an agent's tool intent as an executable tool program that compactly encodes multi-step service interactions with explicit effect types. ToolPro combines constraint-guided program construction, effect-aware replay for exactly-once state-modifying calls, and a profile-driven policy that decides when program execution outperforms stepwise calling. We instantiate ToolPro over MCP-style services with WebAssembly sandboxing and evaluate it on diverse workflows of real-world applications. ToolPro reduces end-to-end latency by up to 53.4\% and client-side traffic by up to 96.1\%, with larger gains under higher network latency and workflow complexity.

22.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

Catecholamine precursor modulation of human exploration: Evidence from a large gender-balanced sample

by Angela Mariele Brands, Kilian Knauth, David Mathar, Tim Roedder, Kerstin Lisner, Jan Peters The catecholamine precursor Tyrosine has been linked to improved cognitive performance, but investigations into decision-making and reinforcement learning processes known to be under catecholamine control are sparse. We examined the impact of a single dose of Tyrosine (2g) on reinforcement learning and exploration in a large (n = 63) gender-balanced sample in a within-subjects preregistered study. Reinforcement learning performance was significantly improved under Tyrosine. Based on previous work, we preregistered the hypotheses that Tyrosine would reduce directed exploration, response times, and physiological arousal. However, neither response times nor physiological arousal revealed the predicted reductions. Computational modelling using an established pre-registered reinforcement learning model revealed that the performance improvement under Tyrosine was due to an increase value-driven exploitation, without affecting directed exploration. Non-preregistered modelling analyses then revealed that accounting for higher-order perseveration substantially improved model fit, and substantiated the observation of increased value-driven exploitation under Tyrosine. Furthermore, it revealed reliable reductions in directed exploration and value-independent perseveration under Tyrosine. Tyrosine thus improved reinforcement learning performance by stabilizing choice patterns in the service of optimizing reward accumulation, modulating several computational mechanisms thought to be under catecholamine control.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Simulation-Augmented Multi-Step Split Conformal Prediction for Aggregated Forecasts

arXiv:2606.16356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study uncertainty quantification for aggregated forecasting tasks such as annual totals and year-over-year growth rates. We propose SA-MSCP, a simulation-augmented multi-step split conformal method that generates future paths from cross-validated residuals using a block bootstrap and constructs prediction intervals from empirical quantiles. Experiments show that SA-MSCP improves empirical coverage over a simulated-path baseline for aggregated and growth-rate targets. Our results demonstrate that simulation-enhanced conformal calibration is an effective and general framework for uncertainty quantification in aggregated time-series forecasting.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

T2MM: An LLM Supported Architecture For Inquiry-Based Modeling

Model Construction is a foundational practice in science learning that relies on visualization and interactivity. Large Language Models, increasingly augmented with multimodal capabilities, have been integrated in education contexts to support learning. However, these tools lack visual interactivity that is required by some learning contexts. We introduce Text to Multimodal Model (T2MM), a robust, dynamic LLM supported architecture that assists in model construction within the open inquiry ecology-based modeling software Virtual Experimental Research Assistant (VERA). T2MM accounts for the current context of the learner's model and creates interactive models, rather than static images, enabling the model to remain responsive to manual adjustment. To measure technical feasibility, we evaluate T2MM through a custom procedurally generated dataset of natural language learner modeling requests and target models within the VERA system. T2MM outperforms a baseline model generation architecture implemented through LLM-supported full code generation, common in the literature, across all measured success metrics. Our contribution not only outlines LLM integration into a inquiry-based learning modeling tool, but also describes a possible architecture through which more interactive multimodal LLM tools can be created.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimizing resource bounds in direct fidelity estimation

arXiv:2606.16336v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct fidelity estimation provides a way to estimate the fidelity between an experimentally prepared state and a desired pure target state without performing full tomography. Two influential formulations were introduced in 2011 by Flammia and Liu and by da Silva, Landon-Cardinal, and Poulin. In these protocols, the total estimation error is controlled through two distinct probabilistic steps: first, the fidelity is approximated using randomly sampled Pauli observables; second, each sampled expectation value is estimated from finitely many measurement outcomes. In this work we show that additional structural information about the noise can substantially sharpen the corresponding resource bounds. In particular, for some canonical channels the effective number of sampled Pauli settings can be reduced, leading to lower measurement cost both in the general pure-state setting and in the case of a stabilizer state. These results illustrate a broader point: worst-case confidence bounds in direct fidelity estimation can be significantly conservative when experimentally relevant structure is ignored. As a technical ingredient, we also revisit the allocation of the total accuracy and confidence budgets between the two probabilistic steps. Reformulating the analysis in terms of separate error parameters yields a constrained optimization problem whose solution lowers the average number of measurements in the general pure-state setting. Numerical simulations based on quantum circuits implemented in Qiskit illustrate both the improvement obtained under structured-noise assumptions and the conservativeness of the original worst-case bounds.