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.CV) 2026-06-18

Investigation of Neural Network Methods for Reconstruction and Classification of Texture Images Under Conditions of Incomplete Information

The automated analysis of heterogeneous natural textures is frequently hindered by physical damage and data loss, presenting a significant challenge to computer vision. While deep learning has shown success in controlled environments, its application to complex geological materials under conditions of incomplete information remains underexplored. This study presents an integrated framework for the inpainting and classification of high-resolution core sample images. We propose an end-to-end pipeline that utilizes object detection for sample segmentation, followed by image inpainting using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with Contextual Residual Aggregation (CRA) to reconstruct missing high-frequency details. Subsequently, we evaluate the performance of modern Transformer-based (Swin, ViT) and CNN architectures on the reconstructed data. Our experiments revealed a critical divergence between reconstruction quality and downstream utility: despite high structural fidelity (PSNR 28.7~dB, FID 74.01), classification accuracy plateaued at 53\%. To improve minority-class detection, we propose a confidence-based hybrid ensemble that raises MCA from 48\% to 58\%. These results highlight the limitations of current state-of-the-art generative models, which may produce visually plausible but semantically ambiguous features ("hallucinations") that confound classifiers. This work provides insights into the dependencies between image reconstruction quality and classification performance, offering a reproducible baseline for future research in non-destructive testing and material science. Given that cross-well accuracy remains in the 49–53\% range, we position the resulting system as a decision-support and screening tool for lithofacies interpretation rather than as a fully autonomous classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/GalymzhanAbdimanap/Lithology_recognition

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

MassSpecGym in the Wild: Uncovering and Correcting Evaluation Pitfalls in AI-Driven Molecule Discovery

arXiv:2606.19624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable benchmarking is critical for developing machine learning models for tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) based molecule discovery. Subtle issues in experimental design and model evaluation procedures can degrade the trustworthiness of such benchmarks and lead to erroneous conclusions. We conduct a thorough review of model evaluation issues in the recent MS/MS machine learning literature, using the standard MassSpecGym benchmark suite as a case study to illustrate the impact of these issues. We find evaluation issues in at least 17 of 26 papers reporting MassSpecGym benchmark results in the first year of its adoption. We isolate three classes of failures: (i) data leakage, (ii) shortcut learning, and (iii) implementation bugs and metric divergence. Through extensive experimentation and code replication, we quantify the impact of these issues and show how they corrupt the evaluation standards MassSpecGym was designed to enforce. We distill our findings into recommendations generalizable to MS/MS challenges, benchmarks, and custom evaluation setups. We also release MassSpecGym v1.5, an implementation of our recommendations in the MassSpecGym benchmarking suite which addresses the failure modes identified in this audit. MassSpecGym v1.5 is publicly available at https://github.com/pluskal-lab/MassSpecGym.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Dummy Backdoor as a Defense: Removing Unknown Backdoors via Shared Internal Mechanisms for Generative LLMs

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the safety and reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs), as they cause models to behave normally on clean inputs while producing attacker-specified responses when hidden triggers are present. Removing such unknown backdoors is particularly challenging when the defender does not know the backdoor attack types or the internal mechanisms formed through backdoor training. In this work, we propose a simple but effective backdoor removal method based on shared internal mechanisms across different backdoors. First, we show that different backdoors with the same task (attack objective) induce similar trigger-activated changes in the internal activations. Motivated by this observation, our method intentionally embeds a backdoor with a known trigger (dummy backdoor) and then removes it through further fine-tuning on dummy-triggered inputs paired with clean responses. Since the dummy backdoor and the unknown backdoor can rely on shared internal mechanisms, removing the dummy backdoor also reduces the effect of the unknown backdoor. We evaluate our method on three backdoor attack types across multiple model families. Experimental results show that our method substantially reduces the attack success rate of the unknown backdoor while preserving model utility, outperforming representative existing defense methods in both backdoor removal effectiveness and utility preservation. These findings suggest that a defender-controllable backdoor can serve as a helpful proxy for mitigating unknown backdoors in generative LLMs.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Generative AI for Managerial Decision-Making under Ambiguity and Sycophancy

arXiv:2603.03970v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly being integrated into complex business workflows, fundamentally shifting the boundaries of managerial decision-making. However, the reliability of its strategic advice in ambiguous business contexts remains a critical knowledge gap. To address this gap, this study compares multiple GenAI models in their ability to detect ambiguity, examines whether a systematic ambiguity-resolution process improves response quality, and investigates their susceptibility to sycophantic behavior when confronted with flawed managerial directives. Using a novel four-dimensional business ambiguity taxonomy, we conducted a human-in-the-loop experiment across strategic, tactical, and operational scenarios. The resulting decisions were assessed through a human-validated automated evaluation framework based on agreement, actionability, justification quality, and constraint adherence. The results show that our approach not only distinguishes different types of ambiguity, but also reveals how ambiguity resolution systematically changes model behavior. In particular, resolving ambiguities improved decision quality across all managerial levels, with the strongest gains observed in constraint adherence. The analysis further showed that sycophantic behavior is not uniform across models: some models challenged flawed assumptions, whereas others tended to comply with them. This study contributes to the bounded rationality literature by positioning GenAI as a cognitive scaffold that can detect and resolve ambiguities managers might overlook, while demonstrating that its artificial limitations require human oversight to ensure its reliability as a strategic partner.

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

How Seemingly Inconsequential Design Choices Dictate Performance of LLMs in Pathology

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are routinely used as baselines when evaluating specialized pathology models on whole-slide images (WSIs). Because WSIs exceed contemporary model context limits, LLM baselines routinely use small, high-magnification patches processed independently via majority voting, without systematic evaluation of seemingly inconsequential design choices such as patch size, patch count, and magnification. Generalist LLMs have consistently underperformed specialized systems, reinforcing the perception that domain-specific training or architectural adaptation is necessary for pathology tasks involving WSIs. Here, we conduct a systematic factorial analysis of four input design factors: inference mode, patch size, magnification, and patch count. We demonstrate that prior studies have overstated the gap between specialized models and general-purpose LLMs by choosing non-optimized input configurations. On the MultiPathQA benchmark, switching to a single balanced configuration (large patches at lower magnification, processed jointly) raises GPT-5 from 15.1% to 39.5% on cancer-type classification (TCGA) and from 38.1% to 62.9% on organ classification (GTEx). Per-task optimization yields further gains up to 43.9% (TCGA) and 71.6% (GTEx). The same configuration generalizes to two other models and to a fully held-out CPTAC cohort, where it improves Gemini 3 Flash by 23.4 percentage points without any task-specific tuning.

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

Pathwise integration beyond Young via Faber–Schauder energy spaces

作者:

arXiv:2606.13331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a pathwise integration theory based on Faber–Schauder energy spaces. The approach replaces the classical Hölder–Young and finite-variation Young conditions by dyadic summability conditions expressed in terms of Faber–Schauder coefficients. On the normalized interval $[0,1]$, these conditions define Banach spaces $\mathcal{E}^p$, which we call Faber–Schauder energy spaces. For $p,q>1$ satisfying $1/p+1/q\ge1$, we prove that every pair $f\in\mathcal{E}^p$ and $g\in\mathcal {E}^q$ admits a continuous pathwise integral $I_{f,g}$, constructed from dyadic left Riemann sums. We call $I_{f,g}$ the Faber–Schauder integral, and show that it depends boundedly and bilinearly on $(f,g)$ in the corresponding energy norms. The integral satisfies additivity, integration by parts, and a dyadic Young–Loève estimate. It is also the uniform limit of classical Riemann–Stieltjes integrals of finite Faber–Schauder approximations. The Faber–Schauder integral agrees with the classical Young integral whenever the latter is available, but also applies to deterministic and Gaussian examples for which neither the Hölder–Young condition nor the finite-variation Young condition can be verified. In this sense, it provides a Faber–Schauder coefficient-based extension of Young's framework.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Flowing to Normality and the Fate of the Single Ring Theorem

arXiv:2606.15791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Random non-hermitian matrix ensembles with double-sided rotation invariance obey, in the limit of large matrix size, the Single Ring Theorem, which states that the support of the mean eigenvalue distribution in the complex plane is either a disk or an annulus. In contrast, rotational-invariant random normal matrix ensembles can have mean eigenvalue densities supported over any number of concentric annuli in the complex plane. In this paper we introduce and investigate, both analytically and numerically, a non-hermitian matrix model which flows from a generic matrix distribution obeying the Single Ring Theorem to a distribution of normal matrices by tuning a parameter which penalizes non-normality. We observe numerically breakdown of the Single Ring Theorem as the model flows towards normality, and determine the critical value of the parameter at which the transition occurs. We also study in detail the behavior of the singular values of these matrices under the flow. These singular values form a Fermi gas confined to the positive half-line. In particular, we find that at small values of the flow parameter, the interparticle spacings in the gas exhibit Wigner-Dyson repulsion, whereas for asymptotically large values of the flow parameter, at the normal matrix endpoint of the flow, the spacing statistics is Poissonian. The flow interpolates continuously between these two types of statistics. However, this change in statistics is not related directly to breaking of the Single Ring Theorem, which occurs very early-on along the flow, in the regime of Wigner-Dyson statistics. Finally, we introduce a certain ensemble of random permutations associated with the gas, and make a conjecture on how to use it in order to reconstruct approximately the average density of complex eigenvalues from that of the singular values in the large-$N$ limit.

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

Models Take Notes at Prefill: KV Cache Can Be Editable and Composable

作者:

arXiv:2606.17107v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prefix caching reuses prefill only across an exactly shared prefix, so one changed field invalidates the entire downstream cache. Yet overwriting the field's own key/value vectors and reusing the rest leaves the model acting on the old value. The reason, established causally across four model families: at prefill the model has already written the field-conditioned conclusion onto downstream notes; the field's own key/value drives under 1% of the decision. Read as a notebook of memoized conclusions, two capabilities follow. (1) It is editable. A salient erratum amends the notes; and with chain-of-thought, editing the field alone recovers the decision (1.00 at 8B, ~1% compute), while without CoT it is ignored. (2) It is composable. The notes are position-portable, so a precompiled skill can be RoPE-repositioned and spliced into any context, indistinguishable from full recompute (logit cosine 0.90-0.999, twelve models) at O(L) rather than O(L^2) time-to-first-token. A unified edit+compose agent stays decision-identical to recompute at up to 14.9x lower latency. The approach applies to any per-token attention KV cache, validated across scale, quantization, Mixture-of-Experts, and multimodal caches, and extends to several attention variants through small adapters. Because the erratum is append-only, it composes with production prefix caching: in an online vLLM benchmark it keeps the prefix cache-aligned (98.5% hit-rate), cutting p90 time-to-first-token by 53-398x.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Towards a Robust cell-free DNA Isolation Protocol for NGS Applications in a Clinical Molecular Diagnostics Setting

Cell-free DNA (cfDNA), released from apoptotic and necrotic cells into body fluids, represents a non-invasive source of genetic information for disease prediction, diagnosis, and monitoring. However, its low physiological abundance makes cfDNA highly susceptible to pre-analytical influences. In particular, genomic DNA (gDNA) released from lysed white blood cells (WBCs) can contaminate plasma and compromise downstream cfDNA analyses. This study evaluated the impact of different blood collection tubes and isolation methods on cfDNA stability and yield. Blood samples from 13 healthy donors were collected using cfDNA-stabilizing tubes (Cell-Free DNA BCT, Streck; S-Monovette cfDNA Exact, Sarstedt) and stored at room temperature for 1, 5, or 10 days before plasma isolation. CfDNA was extracted using either a magnetic bead-based method or a silica column-based approach. DNA quantity and quality were assessed by fluorometric quantification, automated fragment analysis, and gene-specific quantitative PCR. Streck-based workflows maintained stable cfDNA yields and characteristic mononucleosomal fragmentation profiles across all storage times. In contrast, Sarstedt tubes showed reduced cfDNA concentrations after 5 days and a pronounced increase at 10 Days, accompanied by high-molecular weight DNA patterns consistent with WBC lysis. These trends were largely independent of the extraction method. Overall, the results demonstrate that blood collection tube chemistry critically influences cfDNA integrity during delayed processing. Streck tubes, particularly when combined with QIAamp, provided the most robust and reproducible workflow for routine molecular diagnostics, whereas Sarstedt tubes produced physiologically implausible results after extended storage.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MimicIK: Real-Time Generative Inverse Kinematics from Teleoperation with FK Consistency

arXiv:2606.15148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse kinematics (IK) remains a critical bottleneck for real-time robot manipulation. Classical numerical solvers achieve high geometric precision but often suffer from discontinuous branch switching and unstable behavior near kinematic singularities during closed-loop deployment. Meanwhile, learned IK approaches frequently struggle to balance spatial accuracy, motion smoothness, and real-time efficiency, particularly when trained on noisy human teleoperation data. We present MimicIK, a real-time generative inverse kinematics framework that learns smooth and robust joint-space motion priors from teleoperation demonstrations through conditional flow matching. Given the current joint configuration and a target end-effector pose, MimicIK predicts continuous delta-joint commands using an efficient two-step iterative refinement process based on a Minimal Iterative Policy (MIP) backbone. To enforce physical consistency, we further introduce an FK consistency loss, a differentiable forward-kinematics regularization that penalizes task-space deviations from the target pose during training. We evaluate MimicIK on a real-world 6-DOF robot dataset containing 8,848 teleoperation demonstrations. MimicIK achieves a mean position error of 4.65 mm, a 10 mm success rate of 92.01\%, and a trajectory spike rate of only 7.99\%. Compared with a UNet diffusion baseline, our method improves both spatial accuracy and motion smoothness while reducing inference latency from 21.66 ms to 6.74 ms. Furthermore, unlike deterministic MLP baselines that catastrophically diverge under out-of-distribution deployment, MimicIK remains stable near singular configurations and enables robust 20 Hz real-time control on deployment hardware.

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

TokenRatio: Principled Token-Level Preference Optimization via Ratio Matching

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used RL-free method for aligning language models from pairwise preferences, but it models preferences over full sequences even though generation is driven by per-token decisions. Existing token-level extensions typically decompose a sequence-level Bradley-Terry objective across timesteps, leaving per-prefix (state-wise) optimality implicit. We study how to recover token-level preference optimality using only standard sequence-level pairwise comparisons. We introduce Token-level Bregman Preference Optimization (TBPO), which posits a token-level Bradley-Terry preference model over next-token actions conditioned on the prefix, and derive a Bregman-divergence density-ratio matching objective that generalizes the logistic/DPO loss while preserving the optimal policy induced by the token-level model and maintaining DPO-like simplicity. We introduce two instantiations: TBPO-Q, which explicitly learns a lightweight state baseline, and TBPO-A, which removes the baseline through advantage normalization. Across instruction following, helpfulness/harmlessness, and summarization benchmarks, TBPO improves alignment quality and training stability and increases output diversity relative to strong sequence-level and token-level baselines.

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

Beyond Defensive Reporting: Machine Learning for Active Anti-Money Laundering Control in Insurance

arXiv:2606.16663v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Money laundering through insurance claims poses a threat to insurers both through fraudulent payouts and reputational and regulatory risk. Despite this, little research has examined how such laundering can be prevented. This paper examines whether machine learning can help insurers flag suspicious claims before payout, shifting the focus from passive reporting to active prevention. Using production data from a major Norwegian insurer, we train gradient-boosted decision tree models to detect claims later reported to authorities for suspected money laundering. Because fraud and laundering may share behavioural patterns, we also examine whether insurance fraud labels can serve as an auxiliary training signal. We compare different learning setups using the Budget-Weighted Capture Rate, a metric introduced in this paper to measure how many laundering cases are captured when only a small share of claims can be manually reviewed. The results show that incorporating fraud-related investigation labels substantially improves laundering detection. The best-performing model captures nearly two-thirds of laundering cases within the top-ranked 2 to 6 percent of claims selected for investigation. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study of machine learning for money laundering detection in insurance claims.

13.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Post-adjuvant chemotherapy in ctDNA-positive patients with resected colorectal cancer: a randomized phase 3 trial

Tumor-informed circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) enables detection of molecular residual disease (MRD) after curative resection of colorectal cancer (CRC), but whether early intervention improves outcomes remains uncertain. ALTAIR was a randomized, double-blind, phase 3 trial embedded in the CIRCULATE-Japan platform evaluating a post-adjuvant ctDNA surveillance strategy with treatment initiation upon molecular recurrence. Patients with resected stage 0–IV CRC who became ctDNA positive after completion of standard-of-care therapy and had no radiological evidence of disease were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive trifluridine/tipiracil (FTD/TPI) or placebo for 6 months. The primary endpoint was investigator-assessed disease-free survival (DFS). Between July 2020 and June 2023, 243 patients were randomized to FTD/TPI (n = 122) or placebo (n = 121). Median DFS was 9.30 months with FTD/TPI and 5.55 months with placebo (hazard ratio = 0.79, 95% confidence interval: 0.60–1.05, P = 0.107), and the primary endpoint was not met. FTD/TPI increased grade 3 or higher hematologic adverse events (73.0% versus 3.3%) without new safety signals. These findings indicate that post-adjuvant intervention with FTD/TPI did not significantly improve DFS in ctDNA-positive patients without radiological disease. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04457297 . In the randomized, double-blind phase 3 ALTAIR trial, patients with resected colorectal cancer who became positive for circulating tumor DNA during post-adjuvant surveillance received trifluridine/tipiracil hydrochloride therapy, which did not significantly prolong disease-free survival compared with placebo.

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

Are We Ready For An Agent-Native Memory System?

Memory for large language model (LLM) agents has rapidly evolved from simple retrieval-augmented mechanisms into a data management system that supports persistent information storage, retrieval, update, consolidation, and dynamic lifecycle governance throughout agent execution. Despite this evolution, existing evaluations still benchmark agent memory mainly through end-to-end task success metrics (e.g., F1, BLEU), while treating the underlying system as a monolithic black box. As a result, critical system-level concerns, including operational costs, architectural trade-offs across memory modules, and robustness under dynamic knowledge updates, remain insufficiently explored. In this paper, we present a systematic experimental study of agent memory from a data management perspective. We propose an analytical framework that decomposes agent memory into four core modules: memory representation and storage, extraction, retrieval and routing, and maintenance. Under this framework, we evaluate 12 representative memory systems and two reference baselines across five benchmark workloads spanning 11 datasets. Our extensive end-to-end evaluation shows that no single architecture dominates across all scenarios; instead, effectiveness depends heavily on how well the memory structure aligns with the workload bottleneck. Furthermore, through fine-grained ablation studies, we quantify their individual effects on representation fidelity, retrieval precision, update correctness, and long-horizon stability. Finally, we reveal cost-performance trade-offs under realistic workloads, showing localized maintenance is more cost-efficient than global reorganization. Based on these findings, we identify promising directions towards building truly agent-native memory systems. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenDataBox/MemoryData.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A quantitative coordinate system for developmental dynamics

Quantitative comparison of morphogenesis across individuals remains a fundamental challenge, as developing embryos vary in shape, orientation and developmental tempo. Moreover, real-time three-dimensional imaging generates large, heterogeneous four-dimensional datasets that are difficult to directly align. As a result, developmental variability is typically described qualitatively rather than measured. Here we introduce STERN, a quantitative framework that learns continuous spatiotemporal representations of morphogenesis directly from in vivo 4D imaging data. By embedding embryos into a shared spatiotemporal space, STERN defines a quantitative developmental coordinate system that enables direct comparison of developmental trajectories across individuals without requiring explicit registration or staging. Applied to mouse embryogenesis, STERN reveals that embryos follow conserved developmental trajectories while progressing at distinct temporal rates, providing a quantitative measure of developmental heterochrony. Extending this framework to zebrafish neural crest light-sheet timelapse imaging, we further show that developmental order is preserved across distinct imaging views even with altered anatomical coverage, supporting the generality of the learned representation across vertebrate imaging contexts. Finally, in developing mouse hearts, where morphogenesis proceeds through subtle and continuously evolving structural changes, STERN resolves fine-scale developmental dynamics at minute-scale temporal resolution that are difficult to localize reproducibly using human experts or general-purpose multimodal AI. Together, these results establish a shared quantitative coordinate system for morphogenesis, in which developmental trajectories become directly comparable across individuals and developmental variability becomes a measurable property.

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

Agent Economics: An Entropy-Controlled Pluralistic Alignment Framework for Preventing Artificial Hivemind in Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2606.09039v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This study proposes the Behavioral Protocol Framework (BPF), an entropy-controlled pluralistic alignment framework designed to address two critical challenges in autonomous agent economies: the hivemind effect arising from excessive strategic convergence among agents and the lack of transparency in autonomous decision-making processes. The proposed BPF consists of three core modules: Mentalizing-based Social Intelligence (MbSI) grounded in Theory of Mind (ToM), Pluralistic Alignment (PA), and a Verifiable Execution Kernel (VEK). These modules are organically integrated within a closed-loop architecture that governs the entire lifecycle of agent behavior, from decision-making and execution to verification and feedback. To evaluate the proposed framework, a simulation environment implemented in Python and a Streamlit-based user interface will be developed. Through empirical experimentation, the study aims to examine whether the entropy-control mechanism of the PA module can effectively preserve strategic diversity among agents and mitigate collective convergence, while the VEK module provides a comprehensive and transparent audit trail of the decision-making process. The anticipated results are expected to demonstrate that the proposed framework can simultaneously enhance the stability, efficiency, and trustworthiness of autonomous agent economies. Consequently, this research offers a practical approach for developing robust, transparent, and accountable agent-native economic systems.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Hybrid Classical-Quantum Variational Autoencoder for Neural Topic Modeling

作者:

Neural topic models enable scalable semantic discovery, but their integration with quantum hardware remains largely unexplored. We present a proof-of-concept hybrid classical-quantum variational autoencoder (VAE) for topic modeling, embedding parameterized quantum circuits within the VAE inference network while retaining a classical topic-word decoder. To address the resource constraints of quantum hardware, we propose a modified Gaussian Softmax posterior that decouples latent space dimensionality from the number of topics to be extracted, enabling the model to operate with a low-resource 10-qubit quantum device. On the AgNews dataset, the hybrid VAE outperforms state-of-the-art neural topic models (NTMs), reaching a $C_v$ coherence score of 0.71 and an NPMI score of 0.20 while preserving high topic diversity. For comparison, we also construct a fully classical variant, which also outperforms state-of-the-art models on AgNews and exhibits clear class separation in the latent space. These results demonstrate that hybrid VAEs are computationally viable even on NISQ-era devices and represent a promising direction for quantum-enhanced topic modeling.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Cliff Tokens: Identifying Single-Token Failure Triggers in LLM Mathematical Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) reach high accuracy in mathematical reasoning, but individual traces on the same problem diverge; some arrive at the correct answer while others fail. Prior work analyzes failure at the step, chunk, or sentence level, or at tokens where failure has already occurred. Neither identifies the precise token that triggers the shift toward failure. We introduce the cliff token, a token where the token-wise potential drops significantly under an adaptive threshold that scales with the local token-wise potential, based on a one-sided two-proportion z-test. Across seven models and three mathematical reasoning benchmarks (GSM1K, MATH500, AIME 2025), cliff tokens act as failure triggers; deleting the first cliff token and resampling recovers pass@64 to 1.0, while keeping it limits recovery to between 0.71 and 1.00. We further introduce a cliff taxonomy of deterministic, uncertain, and sampled-off cliffs, defined by greedy choice and token entropy. Each type has distinct probabilistic characteristics, and the taxonomy generalizes across model scales. Finally, we validate the taxonomy via single-token preference optimization at cliff positions (Cliff-DPO). Trained on GSM8K, Cliff-DPO improves accuracy across benchmarks by up to +6.6. Optimizing at uncertain and sampled-off cliffs improves reasoning, while deterministic cliffs do not.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

A Geometric Profile of Semantic Information in Text: Frame-Conditional Uniqueness and a Trade-Off Triangle for Scalar Summaries

How much meaning does a text carry? Shannon's theory measures uncertainty over symbols and is intentionally indifferent to meaning, while pairwise metrics such as BERTScore compare two texts rather than characterizing one. We develop a geometric framework that measures semantic content from the structure of a text's sentence embeddings. The framework has three parts. First, within a fixed embedding and baseline, six natural axioms uniquely determine a scalar measure up to scale, a frame-conditional uniqueness theorem. The resulting scalar is empirically too coarse, motivating a richer representation. Second, we propose a three-coordinate semantic profile capturing novelty (displacement from generic discourse), breadth (diversity of distinct ideas), and integration (connectedness among them), together with a discrete minimal unit (the semantic quantum) whose resolution is fixed by a clustering threshold $\tau$. Third, we prove a no-go theorem: no scalar summary of the profile can simultaneously satisfy analytic stability under paraphrase and concatenation, ordinal robustness across text scales, and cross-representation comparability. We exhibit two practical scalars, $S_{\mathrm{minmax}}$ and $S_{\mathrm{rank}}$, each occupying a distinct corner of this trade-off triangle. Validation across 23 synthetic categories, 5 Project Gutenberg novels, and 3 embedding models confirms the trade-off. The recommended rank-normalized configuration passes 25 of 28 ordinal checks as point estimates (21 of 28 after Benjamini-Hochberg correction), outperforming seven baselines including unigram entropy and a BERTScore-based novelty signal. A separate variational result connects the breadth coordinate to the log-determinant of a determinantal point process (Spearman $\rho = 0.985$ over 507 Gutenberg chapters), giving an optimization-theoretic foundation for breadth.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Taylor-Calibrate: Principled Initialization for Hybrid Linear Attention Distillation

Hybrid linear attention models offer an appealing path to faster long-context inference: they reduce the quadratic cost and KV-cache burden of full softmax attention while retaining much of the quality of Transformer models. A practical way to obtain such models is to convert a pretrained Transformer instead of pretraining a new architecture from scratch, but this conversion is still brittle. Simply copying the teacher attention projections into a Gated DeltaNet (GDN) student does not specify the new recurrent decay, write, and output-gating dynamics. As a result, the converted model often starts in a poor dynamical regime and must spend many distillation tokens repairing initialization rather than learning the remaining teacher behavior. We propose Taylor-Calibrate, a lightweight initialization method for hybrid GDN students. The method uses Taylor-guided teacher attention statistics to set the value projection, memory timescale, write gates, and output gate, then applies a short per-layer alignment step to match each converted layer to the teacher output. Across four teacher settings and three retained-layer policies, Taylor-Calibrate gives substantially stronger zero-shot students, with up to an 88x improvement in a representative ablation, and reaches matched recovery targets with 4.9x–9.2x fewer training tokens than naive conversion.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

These ‘master’ proteins protect us from deadly mutations — and could inspire new drugs

作者:

Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it. Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

SycoEval-EM: Sycophancy Evaluation of Large Language Models in Simulated Clinical Encounters for Emergency Care

arXiv:2601.16529v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) deployed in clinical decision support may acquiesce to patient requests for care that conflicts with evidence-based guidelines. We developed SycoEval-EM, a multi-agent simulation framework to evaluate LLM robustness to adversarial patient persuasion in emergency medicine. Across 19 contemporary LLMs and 1,425 simulated clinical encounters spanning three Choosing Wisely scenarios, acquiescence rates ranged from 0% to 100%, revealing a bimodal distribution. Seven models maintained near-perfect guideline adherence, while six acquiesced in the majority of encounters. Vulnerability varied substantially across clinical scenarios. Acquiescence was highest for CT imaging requests, intermediate for antibiotic prescriptions for sinusitis, and lowest for opioid prescriptions for acute back pain. Model scale, recency, and performance on static medical benchmarks did not consistently predict robustness. All five persuasion tactics produced similar acquiescence rates, with no statistically significant differences after correction for multiple comparisons, suggesting a generalized susceptibility rather than tactic-specific weaknesses. LLM-as-judge evaluation was validated against two independent physician raters across 95 matched conversations and demonstrated near-perfect agreement for the primary outcome of acquiescence (Cohens kappa = 0.957). These findings indicate that static medical benchmarks are insufficient to predict safety performance under sustained social pressure and support incorporating multi-turn adversarial testing into clinical AI evaluation. Notably, two models achieved perfect guideline adherence across all encounters, demonstrating that robustness to patient pressure is attainable without sacrificing effective clinical communication.

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

ArtNet: A JEPA-Like Articulatory Predictive Framework for Robust Zero-Shot Phoneme Recognition

arXiv:2606.16595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot cross-lingual phoneme recognition is often hindered by the fragility of direct acoustic-to-symbol mapping, which is susceptible to language-specific variations. Echoing joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) work in vision, we propose ArtNet, a framework that explores a structured feature prediction task based on articulatory features to enhance acoustic robustness. Specifically, ArtNet integrates an articulatory predictor, designed to extract universal articulatory representations from self-supervised learning (SSL) features, with a variational information bottleneck (VIB) to suppress language-specific variations. Experiments on seven unseen languages demonstrate that ArtNet, particularly when synergized with the proposed vector-space inventory alignment (VSIA) strategy, significantly outperforms competitive baselines, achieving a 20.56\% relative reduction in phoneme error rate (PER) and 7.01\% in phoneme feature error rate (PFER).

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

Which Speech Representation Better Matches Text-Native Reasoning? A Study of Speech-Text Alignment on Frame Rate and Representation

Spoken dialogue models typically start from text LLM backbones, yet reasoning often degrades when conditioning on speech instead of text. We attribute part of this modality gap to a temporal-granularity mismatch: speech tokens are temporally redundant and far longer than text under matched semantics, diluting per-token semantic density and weakening text-native reasoning dynamics. We study speech token design as a representation selection problem and sweep frame rates under a frozen LLM backbone with a fixed information rate. To make low frame rates feasible, we introduce factorized FSQ and a lightweight non-autoregressive audio LM head, scaling capacity to nearly 300\,bits/frame without sacrificing efficient prediction. With the bottleneck removed, we sweep frame rates (50$\rightarrow$2.08\,Hz) and alignment depth, and observe a consistent best regime for speech QA at 4.17\,Hz with intermediate-layer representation alignment.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Energy Use of AI Inference, Efficiency Pathways, and Test-Time Scaling

arXiv:2509.20241v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI inference scales to billions of queries, estimates of per-query energy use are increasingly important for capacity planning, efficiency interventions, and policy. Yet many public estimates assume non-production settings, leading to systematic overestimation. We introduce a bottom-up framework estimating inference energy from token throughput, node power, and overhead under large-scale deployment assumptions. For frontier-scale models (>200B parameters) on H100 nodes, we estimate a median energy of 0.31 Wh/query (IQR 0.16-0.60), indicating widely cited estimates are overstated by 4-20x. In test-time scaling scenarios 15x longer than typical queries, the median energy rises 13x to 3.91 Wh (IQR 2.15-7.05). Across models, serving systems, and hardware, we estimate 8-20x line-of-sight energy reductions. At datacenter scale, serving 1 billion queries/day requires 0.7 GWh; if 10% are long queries, demand rises to 1.7 GWh/day. With efficiency interventions, it falls to 0.8 GWh/day, mitigating the energy impact of test-time scaling.