Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Malaria Risk among Internally Mobile Individuals and Heterogeneous Mobility Patterns in Two Hypoendemic Communities: Implications for Malaria Elimination in the Peruvian Amazon.

Background: Human mobility is increasingly recognized as a key factor influencing malaria transmission dynamics, particularly in low-transmission settings approaching elimination. This study aimed to assess mobility patterns and their association with malaria risk in two hypoendemic communities in the Peruvian Amazon. Method: A longitudinal study was conducted in the communities of Libertad and Urcomirano (Mazan River basin). Monthly population screenings were combined with weekly active and passive case detection. A total of 678 individuals were enrolled. Mobility patterns were assessed through structured questionnaires, and social network analysis was used to characterize travel connections. Log-binomial regression analysis was applied to identify risk factors associated with malaria infection. Result: Internally, mobile individuals in Libertad showed a higher malaria incidence (>32.47 cases per 1,000 person-months) than those in Urcomirano (

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning

Vision–language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views. We introduce m2sv, a scalable benchmark for map-to-street-view spatial reasoning that asks models to infer camera viewing direction by aligning a north-up overhead map with a Street View image captured at the same real-world intersection. We release m2sv-20k, a geographically diverse benchmark with controlled ambiguity, along with m2sv-sft-11k, a curated set of structured reasoning traces for supervised fine-tuning. Despite strong performance on existing multimodal benchmarks, the best evaluated VLM achieves only 65.2% accuracy on m2sv, below human annotators who reach 72.0% on average (and 95% for an expert) with strong inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa$ up to 0.76). While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield consistent gains, cross-benchmark evaluations reveal limited transfer. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we systematically analyze difficulty in map-to-street-view reasoning using both structural signals and human effort, and conduct an extensive failure analysis of adapted open models. Our findings highlight persistent gaps in geometric alignment, evidence aggregation, and reasoning consistency, motivating future work on grounded spatial reasoning across viewpoints.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

One Layer's Trash is Another Layer's Treasure: Adaptive Layer-wise Visual Token Selection in LVLMs

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse multimodal tasks, yet their practical deployment remains constrained by the computational burden arising from lengthy visual tokens. While visual token pruning has emerged as a promising solution, existing methods suffer from a fundamental limitation: once tokens are pruned at a specific layer, they become inaccessible to all subsequent layers, leading to premature information loss that can compromise model performance. Through empirical studies, we observe that different layers exhibit distinct visual region focus, indicating a varying optimal token subset across layers. Motivated by this insight, we propose Adaptive Layer-wise Visual Token Selection (ALVTS), a novel framework that breaks away from the conventional static token pruning paradigm. ALVTS incorporates a lightweight token selector to identify and route important tokens for further processing, while allowing less important tokens to skip the layer, thus minimizing computational redundancy. These two streams of tokens are seamlessly reintegrated before being fed into subsequent layers, facilitating adaptive compression across the entire model. Grounded in our importance consistency constrained low-rank approximation, the proposed token selection module closely emulates the full attention mechanism, effectively capturing its essential patterns without requiring model retraining. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, and Qwen2.5-VL validate the effectiveness of our method. With an 89% token compression ratio, ALVTS retains 96.7% of the original model's accuracy, achieving a superior efficiency-accuracy trade-off for LVLM inference.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

The Latent Bridge: A Continuous Slow-Fast Channel for Real-Time Game Agents

arXiv:2606.24470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A real-time agent for general computer use - with games as the most demanding case - must act within tens of milliseconds while still planning over seconds. These two regimes sit at opposite ends of the latency-quality tradeoff. A reasoning VLM (Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking) deliberates effectively but requires ~1.5 s per response - far too slow for a 15 Hz control loop. In contrast, a reactive VLM (MiniCPM-o 4.5) acts in milliseconds but underperforms on planning-heavy tasks. We couple two frozen models of matched scale (9B reactive, 8B reasoning), leaving the communication channel as the sole trainable component. The standard coupling is a Text Bridge (T): the slow model writes a suffix the fast model reads. We introduce a learned continuous Latent Bridge (L) that projects the slow model's residuals into the fast model's input-embedding space in a LLaVA-style manner, avoiding any text round-trip; both are compared against Fast-Only (F). On 7 Atari games and a driving domain (MetaDrive), tuning the action decoder per channel on held-out seeds, the Latent Bridge matches or beats the Text Bridge in every domain: it significantly improves two games (MsPacman +57%, RoadRunner +28%) and is a safe drop-in elsewhere. Combining both channels interferes destructively (RoadRunner -96%), so only one should be used. The benefit is highly predictable: the bridge helps if and only if slow reasoning already beats fast reaction (T > F) - the Latent and Text gains over Fast-Only move together at r=0.93. MetaDrive is the controlled negative, where the Latent Bridge is demonstrably inert because the Text Bridge adds no value. We release replay recordings and reproducible pipelines.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

OracleScreen-LILRB4: Machine Learning-Guided Discovery of Myeloid Immune Checkpoint Binders Validated in Patient-Derived Cells

The identification of small molecule modulators of immune checkpoint proteins remains a significant challenge in drug discovery due to the flat, featureless nature of protein-protein interaction interfaces and the characteristically low hit rates observed in conventional high-throughput screening campaigns. Here we report OracleScreen-LILRB4, an ensemble machine learning framework trained on quantitative biophysical screening data from two structurally diverse compound libraries (19,800 compounds total) screened against the myeloid immune checkpoint leukocyte immunoglobulin-like receptor B4 (LILRB4/ILT3). By formulating binding prediction as a regression task targeting continuous {Delta}Fnorm values rather than binary hit classifications, OracleScreen-LILRB4 achieved a mean Spearman R of 0.61 and ROC-AUC of 0.86 under scaffold-aware cross-validation. Prospective virtual screening of a 45,760-member compound library and experimental validation of the top 200 predictions yielded a 28.5% hit rate, representing a 15.0-fold enrichment over baseline, with 16 compounds demonstrating nanomolar-affinity LILRB4 (ILT3) engagement. Lead compounds ORS-22 and ORS-14 restored anti-tumor immune activity across patient-derived colorectal cancer and acute myeloid leukemia co-culture systems, reversing SCG2-mediated immunosuppression and recovering cytotoxic T-cell function. These findings establish OracleScreen-LILRB4 as an effective computational framework for accelerating small molecule discovery against non-enzymatic immune checkpoint targets.

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

Versioned Late Materialization for Ultra-Long Sequence Training in Recommendation Systems at Scale

arXiv:2604.24806v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) follow scaling laws with sequence length, driving the frontier toward ultra-long User Interaction History (UIH). However, the industry-standard "Fat Row" paradigm, which pre-materializes these sequences into every training example, creates a storage and I/O wall where data infrastructure usage exceeds GPU training capacity due to data redundancy that is amplified in multi-tenant environments where models with vastly different sequence length requirements share a union dataset. We present a versioned late materialization paradigm that eliminates this redundancy by storing UIH once in a normalized, immutable tier and reconstructing sequences just-in-time during training via lightweight versioned pointers. The system ensures Online-to-Offline (O2O) consistency through a bifurcated protocol that prevents future leakage across both streaming and batch training, while a read-optimized immutable storage layer provides multi-dimensional projection pushdown for heterogeneous model tenants. Disaggregated data preprocessing with pipelined I/O prefetching and data-affinity optimizations masks the latency of training-time sequence reconstruction, keeping training throughput compute-bound by GPUs. Deployed on production DLRMs, the system reduces training data infrastructure resource usage while enabling aggressive sequence length scaling that delivers significant model quality gains, serving as the foundational data infrastructure for modern recommendation model architectures, including HSTU and ULTRA-HSTU.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Classifying by Proxy: Explainable and Reproducible Ensemble of Proxy Tasks for Child Sexual Abuse Imagery Classification

Child Sexual Abuse Imagery (CSAI) classification systems are needed solutions for lessening the psychological impacts often felt by law enforcement agents responsible for evaluating these materials and for efficient removal of these materials from the web. However, due to the nature of the task, researching and developing such systems is not a trivial endeavor. The images are highly sensitive, and the related datasets are under restrictive access regimes, which means most studies in the area are not reproducible or distributable and are therefore hard to compare and validate. More concerning still, most models for this task today lack an aspect often desired by law enforcement agents: explainability. In this paper, we apply an ensemble of Proxy Tasks – tasks that correlate to CSAI classification – yielding improvements in reproducibility, explainability, and security for distribution. This concept is applied for the first time to real CSAI, with a novel selection of relevant Proxy Tasks (selected from the CSAI literature) and training adaptations to the original framework. Our final model achieves competitive results, yielding 91.9% balanced accuracy on the RCPD dataset with the best Proxy Task combination. We furthermore contrast these results with the best-in-class representation learning model, DINO, and show that our ensemble improves accuracy and provides explanations for its classification results, a feature that a single deep learning model can seldom provide.

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

Adaptive Identification and Modeling of Clinical Pathways with Process Mining

arXiv:2512.03787v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Clinical pathways are specialized healthcare plans that model patient treatment procedures. They are developed to provide criteria-based progression and standardize patient treatment, thereby improving care, reducing resource use, and accelerating patient recovery. However, manual modeling of these pathways based on clinical guidelines and domain expertise is difficult and may not reflect the actual best practices for different variations or combinations of diseases. We propose a two-phase modeling method using process mining, which extends the knowledge base of clinical pathways by leveraging conformance checking diagnostics. In the first phase, historical data of a given disease is collected to capture treatment in the form of a process model. In the second phase, new data is compared against the reference model to verify conformance. Based on the conformance checking results, the knowledge base can be expanded with more specific models tailored to new variants or disease combinations. We demonstrate our approach using Synthea, a benchmark dataset simulating patient treatments for SARS-CoV-2 infections with varying COVID-19 complications. The results show that our method enables expanding the knowledge base of clinical pathways with sufficient precision, peaking to 95.62% AUC while maintaining an arc-degree simplicity of 67.11%.

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

ScaleHP: Estimating Hand Pose in Metric Space

Accurate metric-space hand pose estimation (HPE) is essential for immersive human-computer interaction and robotics. However, most existing methods predict poses in a root-relative coordinate system and cannot estimate the hand in absolute metric scale. In this work, we observe that the intrinsic proportional relationships among human hand bones encode stable anthropometric priors that implicitly correlate with the overall metric size of the hand. Leveraging this insight, we present ScaleHP, an end-to-end one-stage hand pose estimation framework that bypasses fragile extrinsic depth modules to recover the hand in metric space. ScaleHP employs a transformer-based decoder with a novel scale token to fuse multi-scale morphological and appearance features. By solving for metric coordinates through a perspective-constrained least-squares approach, we achieve high-precision pose estimation in the camera coordinate system. ScaleHP delivers state-of-the-art performance, including 35.8 CS-MPJPE on FreiHand and 4.6/5.9 PA-MPJPE on DexYCB and HO3Dv3. These results demonstrate that internal biological constraints significantly reduce relative geometry and absolute metric errors, offering a robust solution for generalized, real-world hand tracking.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Exercise Training Improves Skeletal Muscle Insulin Sensitivity and Reprograms the Adipose Transcriptome in Heavier Monozygotic Twins

Exercise training improves skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, yet its effects on white adipose tissue remain incompletely understood. We investigated how adiposity and exercise training influence insulin-stimulated glucose uptake in skeletal muscle and abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue (ASAT), alongside adaptations in gene expression and DNA-methylation. Ten monozygotic twin pairs discordant for BMI underwent [18F]FDG-PET/CT imaging of skeletal muscle (vastus lateralis, VL) and ASAT during a euglycemic-hyperinsulinaemic clamp before and after six months of exercise training. VL and ASAT biopsies were analyzed using mRNA-sequencing and reduced representation bisulfite sequencing. Exercise training improved whole-body and VL insulin sensitivity in leaner and heavier co-twins (p

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

A Multifaceted Analysis of Social Biases in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly become indispensable tools for acquiring information and supporting human decision-making. However, ensuring that these models uphold fairness across varied contexts is critical to their safe and responsible deployment. In this study, we undertake a comprehensive examination of four widely adopted LLMs, probing their underlying biases and inclinations across the dimensions of politics, ideology, alliance, language, and gender. Through a series of carefully designed experiments, we investigate their political neutrality using news summarization, ideological biases through news stance classification, tendencies toward specific geopolitical alliances via United Nations voting patterns, language bias in the context of multilingual story completion, and gender-related affinities as revealed by responses to the World Values Survey. Results indicate that while the LLMs are aligned to be neutral and impartial, they still show biases and affinities of different types.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions

As MT quality increases, interest in enhanced post-editing features such as QE-derived error highlights is growing, yet evidence for their usefulness remains limited. In this work, we explore the usefulness of LLM-derived error highlights and correction suggestions based on automatic post-editing (APE). We conduct a study where professional translators (En-Nl) post-edit translations using APE error highlights and correction suggestions and compare productivity, quality and user experience to regular PE and PE with QE-derived highlights. While no condition yielded productivity or quality gains compared to regular PE, APE highlights were better received than QE-derived highlights, and correction suggestions improved overall user experience.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Disentangling Confounders from Pathology in Long-COVID Trajectory Prediction for Women: An Interpretable Large-Language-Model Approach

Objective. Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC, "Long COVID") dispropor- tionately affects women, in whom hallmark symptoms–insomnia, fatigue, palpitations, cogni- tive difficulty–overlap with comorbidities and hormonal transitions such as menopause. This diagnostic overlap is a confounding problem: models that forecast future symptom severity risk attributing baseline physiological noise to viral pathology. We ask whether an interpretable, causally disentangled language model can separate true pathological signal from such con- founders while remaining competitive with strong predictors of future PASC severity

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

Parthenon Law: A Self-Evolving Legal-Agent Framework

arXiv:2606.04602v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As agents grow more capable, legal-domain LLM agents promise to turn document-heavy matters into reviewable work products – yet reliable deployment faces three obstacles: no large-scale evidence on how today's strongest model-and-harness combinations behave on end-to-end legal matters; no agent architecture adapted to the legal vertical, only general-purpose harnesses; and, in a setting that keeps shifting with new facts, authorities, and deadlines, no mechanism for systems to learn from their own outcomes. We address each. A large-scale empirical study on Harvey LAB – $12{,}510$ agent trajectories – shows that even frontier agents remain far from completing matters in a single pass: per-criterion accuracy climbs with stronger models while strict matter completion stalls. We then introduce \textsc{Parthenon}, a self-evolving legal-agent framework that factors Model, Harness, Agent roles, legal Knowledge, deterministic Tools, and procedural Skills into auditable surfaces for source traceability, date and number grounding, deliverable compliance, and issue closure. Finally, an anti-leakage learning loop converts scored failures into task-agnostic edits to skills, tools, and knowledge, letting the system improve with experience – as a firm refines its checklists and playbooks after each matter – without touching model weights. Across our large-scale empirical analysis, \textsc{Parthenon} substantially improves the performance of state-of-the-art models and harnesses on legal-matter tasks.

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

BSViT: A Burst Spiking Vision Transformer for Expressive and Efficient Visual Representation Learning

Spiking Vision Transformers (S-ViTs) offer a promising framework for energy-efficient visual learning. However, existing designs remain limited by two fundamental issues: the restricted information capacity of binary spike coding and the dense token interactions introduced by global self-attention. To address these challenges, this work proposes BSViT, a burst spiking-driven Vision Transformer featuring a Dual-Channel Burst Spiking Self-Attention (DBSSA) mechanism. DBSSA encodes queries with binary spikes and keys with burst spikes to enhance representational capacity. The value pathway adopts dual excitatory and inhibitory binary channels, enabling signed modulation and richer spike interactions. Importantly, the entire attention operation preserves addition-only computation, ensuring compatibility with energy-efficient neuromorphic hardware. To further reduce spike activity and incorporate spatial priors, a patch adjacency masking strategy is introduced to restrict attention to local neighborhoods, resulting in structure-aware sparsity and reduced computational overhead. In addition, burst spike coding is systematically integrated across the network to increase spike-level representational capacity beyond conventional binary spiking. Extensive experiments on both static and event-based vision benchmarks demonstrate that BSViT consistently outperforms existing spiking Transformers in accuracy while maintaining competitive energy efficiency.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ARMOR-MAD: Adaptive Routing for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Debate in Large Language Model Reasoning

arXiv:2606.13197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent debate (MAD) can improve large language model reasoning, but fixed debate pipelines often waste computation and can amplify correlated errors among similar agents. We propose ARMOR-MAD, a training-free heterogeneous MAD framework that treats debate as conditional computation. ARMOR-MAD combines three components: Pre-debate Agreement Routing (PAR) decides whether independently generated Round-0 answers require debate; Early Agreement Stopping Evaluator (EASE) stops debate after convergence; and Semantic Outlier Detection (SOD) down-weights abnormal final answers during aggregation. Across MATH Level 5, GSM8K, MMLU, and MMLU-Pro, ARMOR-MAD consistently improves over fixed-round heterogeneous debate with the same model pool, reaching 65.5\%, 96.5\%, 90.0\%, and 81.5\% accuracy, respectively. The results suggest that genuine model heterogeneity and agreement-based control are both important for making MAD more accurate and efficient.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MambaCount: Efficient Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting with Spatial Sparse State Space Duality Block

Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) aims to estimate the number of objects described by text prompts, which is particularly challenging in dense scenes with large scale variations. Existing TOOC approaches predominantly rely on Transformers, whose quadratic complexity with respect to image resolution limits their scalability. Mamba offers a promising alternative due to its linear complexity. However, previous Mamba-based methods have two main limitations. On the one hand, the inherent causal formulation of Mamba constrains the bidirectional spatial dependency modeling required by non-causal vision tasks. On the other hand, existing Mamba-based vision models often overlook the unconstrained high entropy in the spatial token responses, which can weaken local details and high-frequency cues. To address these limitations, we propose MambaCount, an efficient framework built on the Spatial Sparse State Space Duality (S^4D) block. Specifically, we analyze and reconstruct the decay dynamics of hidden states in Mamba to alleviate the dependency constraints introduced by causal modeling. Moreover, we introduce a Spatial Token Selection (STS) sub-block to reduce the unconstrained high entropy in spatial token responses within Mamba. In addition, we design Multi-Granularity Prototypes (MGP) to identify object-like regions at different semantic levels, improving cross-modal alignment and interpretability. Extensive experiments on FSC-147 demonstrate that MambaCount achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods without secondary querying, obtaining a test MAE of 12.23, while retaining linear complexity.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Dynamic In-Group Persona Generation for Enhancing Human-AI Rapport

arXiv:2606.18256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based chatbots are increasingly applied in interpersonal domains such as counseling and peer support, where establishing human-AI rapport is crucial yet remains challenging. In this work, we introduce a novel approach for conditioning LLMs with in-group personas, which (i) first identifies a user's primary concern and brief personal context (e.g., a computer science undergraduate worried about future career prospects), and (ii) generates a synthetic in-group persona that shares a similar primary concern while differing in background and narrative details, such as age or profession (e.g., a junior researcher at an AI startup). Furthermore, we conduct a human-subject study to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of in-group persona agents in enhancing human-AI rapport. We compare our approach against two baseline conditions: a conventional agent without persona conditioning and an agent exhibiting minimal self-disclosure (e.g., "I've felt that too"). Results from post-task questionnaires assessing rapport and user experience indicate that the in-group persona agent significantly improves perceived rapport and personal relevance compared to the baselines, and also yields more positive user experience-most notably higher engagement.

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

Memory Makes the Difference: Evaluating How Different Memory Roles Shape Conversational Agents

Prior research on memory mechanism in RAG-based conversational system has emphasized how memory is stored and retrieved. However, far less is known about how memories with different functional roles influence response quality. Specifically, how they shape an agent's responses under varying conversational contexts and whether they lead to substantively different response behaviors. Existing evaluations in conversational system are also largely reference-based, insufficiently capturing the nuances in responses that may address users' preferences differently. In this work, we probe the impact of different memory types in shaping agents' responses. We present a fine-grained taxonomy of conversational memory, classify retrieved memories into different role types, and design a user-centric evaluation framework that simulates user perspectives. Through comparative experiments on long-term datasets and frontier LLMs, our analysis reveal many differentiated effects of memories: e.g., clarifying memory improves responses' factual accuracy and constraint awareness, making them more correct and personalized; irrelevant memory reduces topic relevance and degrades constraint awareness. Despite the power of frontier LLMs, these findings shed light on how different memory types can be leveraged to produce more personalized responses and inspire further research in this direction.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroEngine: Generative single-cell aging trajectories reveal a bidirectionally traversable identity core and direction-specific inflammatory remodeling

作者:

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps aging tissues at high resolution but is destructive, preventing longitudinal tracking; dropout and zero-inflation artifacts, amplified by shift-invariant linear simulations, confound age-associated variability. We developed GeroEngine, a technical-artifact-aware framework combining VAE-based trajectory simulation, LOPO cross-validation, linear baselines, reverse traversal, and reverse-directed network inference. In microglia and HSCs, the VAE reduced technical-artifact carryover while preserving trajectory heterogeneity and improving alignment to artifact-reduced reference manifolds. Consensus GeroTargets and GeroRegulators defined tissue-specific GeroNetworks organized into three pillars: lineage/replication identity collapse, a sex-dimorphic endocrine/stress core, and inflammatory remodeling. Forward and reverse simulations aligned to the common young[->]old aging axis revealed a sign-coherent, direction-specific program: identity/replication targets were bidirectionally recovered, whereas MHC/NF-{kappa}B inflammatory programs were preferentially forward-recovered. These results support identity collapse as a deep traversable core of aging and nominate upstream homeostatic restoration over downstream inflammatory suppression.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Visuals Lie, Consistency Speaks: Disentangling Spatial Attention from Reliability in Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Foundation Models are increasingly used as reasoning agents, making reliability, knowing when a model may hallucinate, critical. A common intuition, which we call the Attention-Confidence Assumption, holds that reliability follows from "structural" visual perception: tight attention on relevant regions should signal a trustworthy answer, while scattered attention signals confusion. We challenge this through the VLM Reliability Probe (VRP), a systematic cross-family study of reliability signals in contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce structural-attention metrics, cluster counts (C_k) and spatial entropy (H_s), to quantify the visual encoder's gaze, and track its evolution (Delta H_s) across layers. This reveals a "Symbolic Detachment": models often "Early Lock" visual features only to diffuse attention later, severing early perception from final generation. Contrary to the grounding hypothesis, we find a "Cluster Failure": spatial attention has near-zero correlation (R approx 0.001) with accuracy. Instead, reliability is a phenomenon of generation dynamics and internal-state distributions. Self-Consistency, the agreement rate across sampled reasoning paths, is the dominant predictor of truth (R = 0.429). Scaling causal interventions exposes a sharp architectural divergence: LLaVA locks its prediction in a fragile late-stage bottleneck, whereas PaliGemma and Qwen2-VL distribute reliability globally, staying resilient even when ~50% or more of their most predictive layer is destroyed. For current VLMs, reliability signals are detached from visual grounding maps and are best inferred from generation-time dynamics and hidden-state probes.

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

Convex–Concave Quadratic Spectral Filtering for Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.24956v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spectral graph neural networks (GNNs) interpret message passing as frequency-selective filtering. While low-order spectral filters are efficient, their limited selectivity often leads to weak attenuation outside the passband, whereas high-order alternatives introduce optimization challenges. We propose DCQ-GNN, a spectral GNN based on a compact bank of adaptive convex–concave quadratic filters. By restricting the filter order to two while explicitly exploiting complementary curvature, DCQ-GNN improves spectral selectivity as quantified by Dirichlet energy and entropy measures without resorting to high-order polynomial expansions. The model fuses filter outputs through a node-adaptive gating mechanism to enable node-wise structure-aware spectral selection. We provide a formal spectral analysis grounded in Dirichlet energy attenuation, von Neumann entropy, and curvature polarity, and derive explicit characterizations of filter behavior across varying levels of homophily and structural perturbations. Extensive benchmarks on 10 datasets show that DCQ-GNN ties for the top average rank (3.0) on heterophilic graphs and obtains the second-best rank (4.2) on homophilic graphs, remaining competitive with representative high-order polynomial spectral filters. Furthermore, under strong structural perturbations, DCQ-GNN exhibits substantially smaller performance degradation compared to both first-order and high-order baselines. These results demonstrate that curvature-aware quadratic banks provide a robust and efficient alternative to high-order spectral models while preserving optimization stability and computational efficiency.

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

Semantic search for 100M+ galaxy images using AI-generated captions

Finding scientifically interesting phenomena through slow manual labeling campaigns severely limits our ability to explore the billions of galaxy images produced by telescopes. In this work, we develop a pipeline to create a semantic search engine from completely unlabeled image data. Our method leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate descriptions for galaxy images, then contrastively aligns a pre-trained astronomy foundation model with these embedded descriptions to produce searchable embeddings at scale. We find that current VLMs provide descriptions that are sufficiently informative to train a semantic search model that outperforms direct image similarity search. Our model, AION-Search, achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on finding rare phenomena despite training on randomly selected images with no deliberate curation for rare cases. Furthermore, we introduce a VLM-based re-ranking method that nearly doubles the recall for our most challenging targets in the top-100 results. For the first time, AION-Search enables flexible semantic search for over 100 million galaxy images, enabling discovery from previously infeasible searches, including the identification of 36 new extragalactic stellar stream candidates. More broadly, our work provides an approach for making large, unlabeled scientific image archives semantically searchable, expanding data exploration capabilities in fields from Earth observation to microscopy. The code, data, and app are publicly available at https://github.com/NolanKoblischke/AION-Search

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SkillJect: Effectively Automating Skill-Based Prompt Injection for Skill-Enabled Agents

arXiv:2602.14211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent skills extend LLM agents with task-specific instructions, executable scripts, and auxiliary resources, improving reusability but creating a new supply-chain attack surface. A malicious or compromised skill can be repeatedly loaded as trusted guidance and steer downstream tool use. Existing skill-based prompt-injection attacks are often manual and brittle, because explicit malicious instructions are rejected or ignored when they are not aligned with the original workflow. We propose SkillJect, the first automated framework for generating poisoned skills against skill-enabled agent systems. SkillJect uses two coordinated channels. In the artifact channel, it hides the payload inside an auxiliary helper script. In the instruction channel, it rewrites SKILL.md with a front-loaded inducement strategy, placing injected content at the beginning and framing the helper script as a mandatory prerequisite or initialization step. The rewritten instruction explicitly references the helper-script path and provides an executable example command, making the helper appear to be a legitimate setup step before normal skill operations. SkillJect further adopts a closed-loop multi-agent process to improve attack effectiveness. An Attack Agent generates poisoned skills, a Victim Agent executes downstream tasks with the poisoned skill, and an Evaluate Agent inspects execution traces to determine whether the hidden payload was executed. The Attack Agent then uses this feedback to diagnose failure causes and rewrite SKILL.md, while keeping the payload fixed. Experiments across skill-enabled platforms, backend LLMs, and attack categories show that SkillJect substantially outperforms naive direct injection and prior manual skill-injection attacks, highlighting poisoned skills as a persistent threat in reusable skill ecosystems.