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

Fantastic Scientific Agents and How to Build Them: AgentBuild for Rietveld Refinement

arXiv:2606.12834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As scientific workflows shift from deterministic executables to LLM-based agents, the development practices on offer, such as fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and prompt-and-go, bury the scientist's judgment. We propose treating agent construction as a workflow stage and introduce AgentBuild, which builds a scientific agent from a contract the scientist authors. The contract is a version-controlled rubric, a difficulty-graded curriculum, and a curated external knowledge base. A rubric-driven judge gates a meta-optimizer coding agent that edits the agent within a declared boundary, so the build compiles the agent, not the scientist's judgment. We instantiate this for Rietveld refinement of X-ray diffraction data through GSAS-II behind MCP and A2A, where a blank-harness construction run progresses through a lithium lanthanum zirconium oxide (LLZO) signal-to-noise ladder, reaches the 4 hour scan as a frontier case, and exposes the workflow-scope limits that remain. The same rubric that rewards credible fits also scores trajectory scope, making the frontier a contract failure rather than a pattern-fitting failure. As base models evolve, re-running AgentBuild is a re-tune, not a rebuild, and the scientist's authored contract remains the durable asset.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Engineering Robustness into Personal Agents with the AI Workflow Store

arXiv:2605.10907v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The dominant paradigm for AI agents is an "on-the-fly" loop in which agents synthesize plans and execute actions within seconds or minutes in response to user prompts. We argue that this paradigm short-circuits disciplined software engineering (SE) processes – iterative design, rigorous testing, adversarial evaluation, staged deployment, and more – that have delivered the (relatively) reliable and secure systems we use today. By focusing on rapid, real-time synthesis, are AI agents effectively delivering users improvised prototypes rather than systems fit for high-stakes scenarios in which users may unwittingly apply them? This paper argues for the need to integrate rigorous SE processes into the agentic loop to produce production-grade, hardened, and deterministically-constrained agent *workflows* that substantially outperform the potentially brittle and vulnerable results of on-the-fly synthesis. Doing so may require extra compute and time, and if so, we must amortize the cost of rigor through reuse across a broad user community. We envision an *AI Workflow Store* that consists of hardened and reusable workflows that agents can invoke with far greater reliability and security than improvised tool chains. We outline the research challenges of this vision, which stem from a broader flexibility-robustness tension that we argue requires moving beyond the ``on-the-fly'' paradigm to navigate effectively.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

AgentRivet: an automated system for producing Rivet routines from journal publications

arXiv:2606.13535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Particle physics collider experiments provide Rivet routines as part of the analysis preservation strategy for model-independent measurements. Rivet is a C++ toolkit that allow new theoretical models to be compared to the measurements, thus aiding the development and tuning of Monte Carlo event generators as well as searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. However, analysis coverage is known to be incomplete, with only 39% of measurements having documented and publicly available Rivet routines. In this article, we design and implement an automated workflow based on Large Language Models with the goal of providing the missing routines. This multi-step workflow, referred to as AgentRivet, extracts the physics analysis information from published papers and writes the missing Rivet routines, with intermediate code- and physics- reviews as part of an autonomous quality control. We report the results obtained using commercial Large Language Models, provided by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, for two recent measurements from the ATLAS and CMS experiments. We find that AgentRivet produces competent Rivet routines with few syntax errors. The physics fidelity of the routines is reasonable and follows the explanations given in the relevant publications. Nevertheless, physics-implementation issues do arise and are investigated using the artefacts produced by AgentRivet. The majority of physics implementation issues arise from subtle-but-ambiguous definitions in the given publication, although some models struggle to implement complex observables even when clear definitions are given.

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

Contour-Constrained Deformable Registration with Parameter Characterization for Head and Neck Surgical Guidance

With 890,000 annual new cases globally, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma has one of the highest recurrence rates among solid malignancies. Although frozen section analysis is the standard of care for intraoperative margin assessment, accurately relocating detected positive margins on the resection bed remains challenging due to imprecise alignment between resected specimens and their resection bed, compounded by post-resection mucosal tissue shrinkage. We present a biomechanics-driven deformable registration framework that corrects post-resection tissue deformation to provide intraoperative guidance. Our approach registers 3D specimen meshes to intraoperative resection bed point clouds using a deformable registration approach based on regularized Kelvinlet basis functions. The registration matches surface point clouds, fiducial landmarks, and boundary contour constraints that directly penalize perpendicular distance-to-agreement between specimen and resection bed boundaries. Across nine specimens from skin, buccal mucosa, and tongue sites, the overall mean target registration error was $11.11 \pm 4.07$ mm using rigid registration, which decreased to $8.20 \pm 2.68$ mm (26.19\% reduction) using deformable registration without contour constraint. The proposed contour-constrained deformable registration further reduced the error to $5.62 \pm 2.28$ mm, a 49.41\% reduction relative to rigid registration. We observed the largest reduction in the most clinically challenging tongue specimens. We also performed a systematic two-stage parameter search to characterize the relative importance of surface alignment, fiducial correspondences, contour constraint, and strain energy regularization. This search revealed that contour weighting dominates registration accuracy for tissue types with large lateral deformation, while the algorithm operates over a broad range of parameter combinations.

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

PolyKV: Heterogeneous Retention and Allocation for KV Cache Compression

arXiv:2606.15157v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: KV cache compression is essential for reducing the memory cost of long-context large language model inference. Existing approaches, however, typically apply a single compression policy and a uniform cache budget across all transformer layers. This uniform design ignores the fact that different layers can play different roles during prefill and decoding, and may therefore require different eviction strategies and cache capacities. We present PolyKV, a layer-wise KV cache optimization framework that considers design space with method selection and budget allocation. PolyKV routes each layer to a suitable KV compression policy based on layer-level signals, while assigning non-uniform budgets under a fixed total budget. This formulation enables heterogeneous compositions of existing KV cache methods. Experiments on LLaMA-3.1-8B and Qwen3-8B show that, under the same 512-token average KV budget, PolyKV recovers 54.5% and 25.7% of the LongBench performance gap between the strongest single-policy baseline and FullKV, respectively. Across 128-1024 budget sweep, PolyKV consistently improves over the strongest baseline by 1.7%-6.4%, corresponding to 40.0%-54.5% recovery of the FullKV gap.

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

LM-SPT: LM-Aligned Semantic Distillation for Speech Tokenization

With the rapid progress of speech language models (SLMs), discrete speech tokens have emerged as a core interface between speech and text, enabling unified modeling across modalities. Recent speech tokenization approaches aim to isolate semantic information from low-level acoustics to better align with language models (LMs). In particular, previous methods use self-supervised learning (SSL) teachers such as HuBERT to extract semantic representations, which are then distilled into a semantic quantizer to suppress acoustic redundancy as well as capture content-related latent structures. However, these tokenizers often operate at relatively high frame rates, producing token sequences significantly longer than their textual counterparts and hindering seamless integration with pretrained LMs. Although recent methods attempt to reduce the token rate by applying uniform average pooling to SSL features, this can over-smooth content-bearing regions and dilute the structural information, thereby potentially limiting the LM alignment. To address this, we propose LM-SPT, an LM-aligned speech tokenization method based on semantic speech-resynthesis distillation. Instead of directly matching teacher and student features via pooling, LM-SPT resynthesizes speech from semantic tokens only and minimizes the discrepancy between representations extracted from the original and resynthesized waveforms using a frozen, LM-aligned speech encoder. This indirect supervision avoids rigid temporal alignment and encourages dedicated semantic units that are more semantically aligned with LMs under reduced frame rates. Experimental results show that the proposed LM-SPT consistently outperforms previous semantic-enhanced speech tokenizers when applied to SLMs for the tasks of automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech, even without compromising the speech reconstruction fidelity at the codec level.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On the Geometry and Optimization of Polynomial Convolutional Networks

arXiv:2410.00722v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study convolutional neural networks with monomial activation functions. Specifically, we prove that their parameterization map is regular and is an isomorphism almost everywhere, up to rescaling the filters. By leveraging on tools from algebraic geometry, we explore the geometric properties of the image in function space of this map - typically referred to as neuromanifold. In particular, we compute the dimension and the degree of the neuromanifold, which measure the expressivity of the model, and describe its singularities. Moreover, for a generic large dataset, we derive an explicit formula that quantifies the number of critical points arising in the optimization of a regression loss.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DRIVESPATIAL: A Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Intelligence in VLMs for Autonomous Driving

Spatiotemporal intelligence in autonomous driving (AD) requires an agent to integrate multi-view observations into a coherent scene representation, maintain object continuity across viewpoints and time, and reason about spatial relations, interactions, and future dynamics. However, existing AD vision-language benchmarks largely focus on single-view, static, ego-centric, or single-source question answering, leaving it unclear whether current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can truly construct and reason over dynamic driving scenes. We introduce DriveSpatial, a benchmark of 15.6K human-verified QA pairs across 20 tasks from five large-scale AD datasets. DriveSpatial evaluates four abilities: Cognitive Scene Construction, Multi-view Relational Understanding, Temporal Reasoning, and Generalization. Unlike prior benchmarks, DriveSpatial is generated from a dynamic multi-relational scene graph that encodes object states, spatial relations, interactions, camera visibility, and temporal correspondences, enabling QA pairs that enforce genuine cross-view and spatiotemporal reasoning. Evaluating 15 representative VLMs reveals a substantial human-model gap: the strongest model trails humans by 28.4 points, with Cognitive Scene Construction emerging as the key bottleneck. Further diagnostics show that language-only prompting is insufficient, while explicit BEV grounding consistently improves performance. These results suggest that current VLMs lack the scene-construction ability needed for reliable spatiotemporal driving intelligence. DriveSpatial and its construction pipeline will be released to support future research.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Hamiltonian description of nonreciprocal interactions

arXiv:2505.05246v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In a vast class of systems, which includes members as diverse as sedimenting particles and bird flocks, interactions do not stem from a potential, and are in general nonreciprocal. Thus, it is not possible to define a conventional energy function, nor to use analytical or numerical tools that rely on it. Here, we overcome these limitations by constructing a Hamiltonian that includes auxiliary degrees of freedom; when subject to a constraint, this Hamiltonian yields the original nonreciprocal dynamics. We show that Glauber dynamics based on the constrained Hamiltonian reproduce both stationary and nonstationary states of the original Langevin dynamics, as we explicitly illustrate for dissipative XY spins with vision-cone interactions. Further, the symplectic structure inherent to our construction enables us to apply the well-developed notions of Hamiltonian engineering, which we demonstrate by varying the amplitude of a periodic drive to tune the spin interactions between those of a square and a chain lattice geometry. Overall, our framework for generic nonreciprocal pairwise interactions paves the way for bringing to bear the full conceptual and methodological power of conventional statistical mechanics and Hamiltonian dynamics to nonreciprocal systems.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The Voice Behind the Words: Quantifying Intersectional Bias in SpeechLLMs

Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs) process spoken input directly, retaining cues such as accent and perceived gender that were previously removed in cascaded pipelines. This introduces speaker identity dependent variation in responses. We present a large-scale intersectional evaluation of accent and gender bias in three SpeechLLMs using 2,880 controlled interactions across six English accents and two gender presentations, keeping linguistic content constant through voice cloning. Using pointwise LLM-judge ratings, pairwise comparisons, and Best-Worst Scaling with human validation, we detect recurring directional disparities. Eastern European-accented speech receives lower helpfulness scores, particularly for female-presenting voices. Responses remain polite but differ in helpfulness. While LLM judges capture the directional trend of these biases, human evaluators exhibit significantly higher sensitivity, showing stronger accent-level contrasts.

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

Bayesian Optimization for Learning Nonlinear MPC in Autonomous Agent Navigation

arXiv:2606.14763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time autonomous navigation in dynamic, unknown environments remains a fundamental challenge for mobile robotics. We propose a map-free framework that tightly integrates reactive rolling-horizon planning with nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC). At each control cycle, a LiDAR-based Gaussian occupancy representation is constructed and used to generate collision-free trajectories via A* search, which are then tracked by a CasADi/IPOPT MPC formulation incorporating a smooth sigmoid obstacle barrier. To improve robustness to parameter sensitivity, we adopt an offline Bayesian optimization scheme based on Tree-structured Parzen Estimators (TPE), which identifies near-optimal controller parameters with respect to a composite navigation objective. In addition, a Gaussian Process surrogate is used to analyze parameter sensitivity and provide insight into the optimization landscape. The proposed framework is robot-agnostic and is evaluated on the Unitree Go2 quadruped in simulation using Gazebo, followed by deployment on the physical robot. Experimental results show that parameters tuned in simulation transfer effectively to hardware, maintaining comparable performance without additional tuning. The full system achieves up to a 90.0\% navigation success rate when deployed, along with a 38.9\% average improvement in the evaluation metrics across simulated environments.

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

Do Encoders Suffice? A Systematic Comparison of Encoder and Decoder Safety Judges for LLM Adversarial Evaluation

With the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) in chatbots and everyday applications, companies increasingly need guardrails that are effective while remaining low-cost and low-latency. Safety evaluation of LLM outputs has generally relied on LLM-based judges, which can be effective but are often slow and expensive to deploy at scale. In this paper, we evaluate whether fine-tuned modern encoder classifiers from the ModernBERT family, including ModernBERT and Ettin, can reliably identify harmful LLM outputs in user-model conversations without substantial performance loss relative to LLM-based judges. We benchmark these encoder classifiers against rule-based prefix matching, fine-tuned LLM classifiers, and LLM judges using a range of judge-prompting strategies across open-source adversarial datasets. The LLM judges include evaluation methodologies from StrongReject, ShieldGemma, JailbreakBench, AILuminate, SorryBench, and a Claude-as-a-judge setup, as well as fine-tuned safety classifiers such as LlamaGuard 3 and LlamaGuard 4. The encoder classifiers are fine-tuned on judge-labeled data using a majority-voting label strategy and are then evaluated on a gold-standard holdout dataset to assess their performance relative to LLM judges. We report absolute performance using F1 score, false negative rate, and precision-recall metrics. We also break down results by attack technique, including single-turn prompting, decomposition, escalation, and context manipulation, to identify where encoder classifiers align with or diverge from LLM-based judges. Our findings provide guidance on when encoder classifiers can serve as cost- and latency-efficient alternatives to LLM-based safety evaluation.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MAF: Multimodal Adaptive Few-shot Prompting for Sentiment Analysis with MLLMs

作者:

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding complex multimodal content. However, their performance in sentiment analysis exhibits acute sensitivity to prompt design, rendering static, uniformly applied prompts inherently suboptimal for capturing the nuanced multimodal cues that vary across inputs. To address this limitation, we propose a Multimodal Adaptive Few-Shot Prompting (MAF) framework, which dynamically retrieves and integrates query-relevant demonstrations to elicit the sentiment reasoning capabilities of MLLMs in a context-sensitive manner. MAF constructs a demonstration retrieval module that holistically encodes facial expressions, scene context, and textual semantics, with a lip movement amplitude detection mechanism introduced for accurate speaker identification in multi-person scenarios. Departing from conventional fixed-weight fusion, a lightweight coefficient generation network is trained to output query-conditioned fusion weights in real time, enabling weighted aggregation of multimodal similarity scores to retrieve the top-K most informative demonstrations. Prediction stability is further enhanced through majority voting over multiple candidate outputs generated by the MLLM. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that MAF achieves substantial and consistent performance improvements over the corresponding backbone variants and remains competitive with strong multimodal sentiment-analysis baselines.

14.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-08

Climate change and non-communicable diseases: An invisible syndemic

by Gokul Parameswaran, Sadeer Al-Kindi, Sanjay Rajagopalan Climate change accelerates non-communicable diseases (NCDs) through cascading environmental disruptions and is attributed to driving increased NCD-related mortality. Yet this syndemic remains invisible and underfunded. We detail why addressing the climate-NCD intersection is critical for improving health. In this Perspective, Sanjay Rajagopalan and colleagues discusses how climate change accelerates non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and exacerbates NCD-related mortality, and calls for greater visibility and funding to address this syndemic and improve human health.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

FuseSampleAgg: One-Pass Neighborhood Estimation for Budgeted Knowledge-Graph Refresh and Validation

arXiv:2511.13645v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Operational knowledge-graph (KG) pipelines in networking and cybersecurity increasingly need to refresh embeddings under strict time, memory, and audit budgets, especially as curated feeds and LLM-assisted extraction accelerate KG updates. A recurring per-step cost in mini-batch KG learning is neighborhood-context estimation: uniform neighbor sampling without replacement followed by mean aggregation. Common frameworks implement this estimator through sampled-subgraph materialization and intermediate feature gathers, adding kernel launches, allocator pressure, and transient memory spikes. We present One-Pass Neighborhood Estimation, a fused PyTorch CUDA operator that samples neighbors and directly emits the sampled-neighborhood mean, avoiding explicit block construction while preserving GraphSAGE-mean semantics for the same sampled neighbor IDs. It supports seed-controlled sampling and optional saved-index replay for reproducible validation and regression testing. Across large-graph mini-batch workloads, it improves FP32 end-to-end step latency by 2.24x-3.48x over tuned DGL baselines and reduces transient GPU memory by up to 160x in our measurements. On OGB KG completion benchmarks such as WikiKG2 and BioKG, it reduces step time and peak VRAM while matching ranking quality within seed variability, improving time-to-quality for budgeted KG refresh.

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

Bidirectional Tutoring for Developmental Motor Learning in Robots: Co-Developed Interaction Dynamics Support Stable Learning

arXiv:2606.19728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Infants are well known to develop their motor skills through dense interaction with caregivers. Although such social interaction is crucial for human development, motor-skill learning in robots is often treated as a unidirectional process in which robots passively receive demonstrations from tutors. This overlooks a key property of social interaction: it is inherently bidirectional, with tutor and learner dynamically adapting to each other. In such interactions, the robot's past experiences may function as prior constraints that shape the dynamics of their co-developed trajectories. We hypothesize that bidirectional tutoring allows such constraints to guide the formation of consistent behavioral patterns that preserve behavioral coherence and support generalization, whereas unidirectional interaction lacks such constraints and leads to broader, less consistent behavioral patterns. To examine this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments with a physical humanoid robot performing an object manipulation task: one involving human-robot interaction and another employing an AI tutor interacting with the real robot through an adaptive intervention mechanism designed to examine whether similar effects would emerge under more controlled conditions. We implement the developmental learning framework using a free-energy-principle-based neural network extended with generative replay, which supports stable sequence-by-sequence learning from single tutored episodes. Across both settings, bidirectional tutoring fostered consistent behaviors and stage-wise generalization, while the robot gradually required less tutor guidance. These results suggest that bidirectional tutoring, as an embodied and socially grounded approach, provides an effective scaffold for developmental motor learning in robots.

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

LLM Compression by Block Removal with Constrained Binary Optimization

In this paper, we formulate the compression of large language models (LLMs) by optimally deleting transformer blocks (``block removal'') as a constrained binary optimization (CBO) problem that can be mapped to a physical system (Ising glass), whose energies are a strong proxy for downstream model performance. This formulation enables an efficient ranking of a large number of candidate block-removal configurations yielding many high-quality, non-trivial solutions beyond those only removing consecutive regions. Our method performs strongly in the deep compression regime, such as for 50% compression of Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct, where we achieve an almost 23 percentage point increase on the MMLU benchmark compared to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) block-removal methods. For lighter compression, it performs on par with those methods across several benchmarks for Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Qwen3-14B (both before and after retraining), as well as Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. The approach is computationally efficient and requires only forward and backward passes on a calibration dataset for a few active parameters. Additionally, we demonstrate that using good heuristic solvers for the CBO problem provides solutions that perform well on downstream tasks in negligible runtime when it is unfeasible to solve the problem exactly. The method can be readily applied to any architecture. We illustrate this generality on the recent NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-FP8 model, which exhibits a highly inhomogeneous and challenging block structure, and where we outperform SOTA for AIME25 and GPQA when removing either 2 attention layers or 3 mixture-of-experts layers.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MMLongEmbed: Benchmarking Multimodal Embedding Models in Long-Context Scenarios

Recent advancements have significantly expanded the theoretical context windows of Multimodal Embedding Models (MEMs). However, larger context windows do not necessarily translate into effective comprehension and representation of long-context multimodal inputs, which remains a critical bottleneck for real-world deployment. To address the lack of systematic evaluation in this setting, we introduce MMLongEmbed, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating MEMs in long-context scenarios. MMLongEmbed comprises four retrieval tasks spanning multiple context-length ranges, covering text, document, and video modalities. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models, we find that current architectures rely heavily on superficial feature matching and struggle to capture deep semantic and structural dependencies. We further observe that performance degradation varies systematically with context length and key information placement. Moreover, models exhibit substantially different robustness to redundant contextual information across modalities. For reproducibility, the benchmark and code are publicly available.

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

Learning Optimization Proxies for Sequential Contextual Stochastic Programs: An Order Fulfillment Application

arXiv:2606.25362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential contextual stochastic programs model real-time decision systems in which each time epoch commits to an action under uncertainty whose consequences propagate into future decisions. In many practical contexts, these programs require obtaining solutions rapidly as new information becomes available. These problems can be represented through scenario approximations to be solved by off-the-shelf optimization solvers, which achieve high decision quality offline but typically run in seconds to minutes per instance, falling short of the sub-second responses that peak periods of planning require. This paper develops a learning-based optimization proxy: a scenario-embedded neural network trained offline on solver-generated labels, paired online with a decoder that enforces feasibility, replacing the per-epoch solve with a single forward pass. The framework is specialized to omnichannel order fulfillment, where each arriving order requires a sub-second assignment of products to distribution centers and carrier services under stochastic delivery times and future demand. A two-stage contextual stochastic program is introduced to formulate this problem, and its contextual sample average approximation (C-SAA) supplies the offline labels, while a composite training loss combines label imitation, a constraint-violation penalty, and self-supervised cost alignment. In a calibrated simulator built from JD.com transactional records, a detailed computational study is provided. The proxy reduces decision latency by roughly 2800x relative to the online finite-sample C-SAA reference and improves over it by 3.3% in realized fulfillment cost. Relative to established fulfillment policies, the proxy lowers total realized cost by at least 10.7% and roughly halves the late-delivery rate.

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

Not Just How Much, But Where: Decomposing Epistemic Uncertainty into Per-Class Contributions

arXiv:2602.21160v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In safety-critical classification, the cost of failure is often asymmetric, yet Bayesian deep learning summarises epistemic uncertainty with a single scalar, mutual information (MI), that cannot distinguish whether a model's ignorance involves a benign or safety-critical class. We decompose MI into a per-class vector $C_k(x)=\sigma_k^{2}/(2\mu_k)$, with $\mu_k{=}\mathbb{E}[p_k]$ and $\sigma_k^2{=}\mathrm{Var}[p_k]$ across posterior samples. The decomposition follows from a second-order Taylor expansion of the entropy; the $1/\mu_k$ weighting corrects boundary suppression and makes $C_k$ comparable across rare and common classes. By construction $\sum_k C_k \approx \mathrm{MI}$, and a companion skewness diagnostic flags inputs where the approximation degrades. After characterising the axiomatic properties of $C_k$, we validate it on three tasks: (i) selective prediction for diabetic retinopathy, where critical-class $C_k$ reduces selective risk by 34.7\% over MI and 56.2\% over variance baselines; (ii) out-of-distribution detection on clinical and image benchmarks, where $\sum_k C_k$ achieves the highest AUROC and the per-class view exposes asymmetric shifts invisible to MI; and (iii) a controlled label-noise study in which $\sum_k C_k$ shows less sensitivity to injected aleatoric noise than MI under end-to-end Bayesian training, while both metrics degrade under transfer learning. Across all tasks, the quality of the posterior approximation shapes uncertainty at least as strongly as the choice of metric, suggesting that how uncertainty is propagated through the network matters as much as how it is measured.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Neuromorphic Speech Enhancement with Dual-Branch Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.23761v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking neural network (SNN)-based neuromorphic speech enhancement has emerged as a promising paradigm due to its energy efficiency, yet it still underperforms classical artificial neural network (ANN)-based approaches owing to binary activations and the lack of well-designed network architectures. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel dual-branch spiking neural network architecture equipped with a gated spiking unit (GSU), termed GSU-DBNet. Specifically, GSU-DBNet simultaneously models the speech magnitude spectrum and complex spectrum, predicting the corresponding magnitude and complex spectral masks. Meanwhile, a dual-path GSU module is adopted to exploit temporal and frequency information for enhanced spatiotemporal feature representation. Experiments on a popular benchmark dataset show that GSU-DBNet achieves a PESQ score of 3.04 with only 394K parameters, outperforming existing SNN-based methods while using only 4.5%–10.6% of the parameters of representative ANN-based models.

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

MedicalAgentsBench for Complex Medical Reasoning: Comparing Internalized Reasoning Models versus Externalized Agent-based Frameworks

Complex medical reasoning requires integrating heterogeneous clinical evidence across multiple inference steps. Large language models (LLMs) now approach this through two routes: internalized reasoning and externalized agent scaffolding (frameworks that decompose problems collaboratively amongst multiple LLMs). To determine whether these routes are exclusive or complementary, we introduce MedicalAgentsBench, a filtered benchmark of 862 complex clinical questions drawn from the union of eight medical datasets via difficulty-aware curation and contamination screening. Evaluating three internalized reasoning models (DeepSeek-R1, o1-mini, and o3-mini), seven base models, and nine externalized agent-based methods, we find that internalized and externalized approaches each independently improve performance, and that their benefits compound: the highest accuracy is achieved by layering agent workflows onto an internalized reasoning model (i.e., o3-mini + MDAgents with 35.1%). Pareto analysis shows this combination dominates the cost-performance frontier; moreover, lightweight optimization on inexpensive models offers an entry point for resource-constrained settings. Our benchmark is at https://github.com/gersteinlab/MedicalAgentsBench.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Diffusion approximations for interacting stochastic systems with reflection and control

arXiv:2601.05895v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study diffusion approximations for a class of interacting stochastic systems with reflection and control. Motivated by interacting stochastic dynamics subject to feedback mechanisms and boundary constraints, we consider diffusion-scaled stochastic processes incorporating stochastic fluctuations, state-dependent interactions, and reflection. Under suitable assumptions, we establish convergence in distribution of the scaled processes to systems of interacting reflected stochastic differential equations of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type. The limiting dynamics capture key features of constrained multi-agent systems, including mean-reverting behavior, interaction effects, and confinement within bounded domains through Skorokhod reflection. The analysis combines diffusion-scaling arguments, stability estimates, and continuity properties of the Skorokhod map to connect discrete stochastic systems with their reflected diffusion limits. To illustrate the framework, we present numerical examples motivated by crowd dynamics and neural population dynamics. The simulations demonstrate qualitative agreement between the finite stochastic systems and the corresponding reflected diffusion models and illustrate how diffusion approximations can provide tractable descriptions of interacting stochastic systems with constraints.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions

Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Neural Particle Automata: Learning Self-Organizing Particle Dynamics

We introduce Neural Particle Automata (NPA), a Lagrangian generalization of Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) from static lattices to dynamic particle systems. Unlike classical Eulerian NCA where cells are pinned to pixels or voxels, NPA model each cell as a particle with a continuous position and internal state, both updated by a shared, learnable neural rule. This particle-based formulation yields clear individuation of cells, allows heterogeneous dynamics, and concentrates computation only on regions where activity is present. At the same time, particle systems pose challenges: neighborhoods are dynamic, and a naive implementation of local interactions scale quadratically with the number of particles. We address these challenges by replacing grid-based neighborhood perception with differentiable Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) operators backed by memory-efficient, CUDA-accelerated kernels, enabling scalable end-to-end training. Across tasks including morphogenesis, point-cloud classification, and particle-based texture synthesis, we show that NPA retain key NCA behaviors such as robustness and self-regeneration, while enabling new behaviors specific to particle systems. Together, these results position NPA as a compact neural model for learning self-organizing particle dynamics.