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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Intellectual Property Literacy, Innovation Readiness and Innovation Practice in Syria's Pharmaceutical Sector: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background Innovation in pharmaceutical sectors operating under resource and institutional constraints may depend not only on knowledge and attitudes but also on the conditions that enable innovation-related activities to occur. This study examined the relationships among intellectual property (IP) literacy, innovation attitudes, innovation readiness, and reported innovation practice among pharmaceutical professionals in Syria. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 303 pharmaceutical professionals between March and April 2026. Four composite indices were constructed to assess IP literacy, innovation attitudes, innovation readiness, and innovation practice. Descriptive statistics, correlation analyses, group comparisons, and multivariable regression models were used to characterize patterns of association among study domains. The analysis was designed to identify empirical patterns rather than infer causal relationships. Results Innovation attitudes were comparatively high (73.56/100), whereas innovation readiness (17.00/100) and innovation practice (12.65/100) were substantially lower. IP literacy was positively associated with innovation readiness (r = 0.384, p < 0.001) and innovation practice (r = 0.205, p < 0.001). In contrast, innovation attitudes were not significantly associated with reported innovation practice (p = 0.332). Regression analyses indicated that the inclusion of innovation readiness improved model fit beyond specifications based on knowledge and attitudes alone ({Delta}R{superscript 2} = 0.058, p = 0.028). Significant differences in readiness and practice were observed across professional groups (p < 0.001), whereas knowledge and attitudes showed limited variation. Conclusions High levels of innovation-related knowledge and positive attitudes did not correspond to high levels of reported innovation practice in this setting. The findings suggest that innovation readiness may capture enabling conditions that are not reflected by knowledge or attitudinal measures alone. These results support the value of examining contextual and institutional factors when assessing innovation capacity in resource-constrained pharmaceutical systems. Given the substantial gap observed between innovation attitudes and innovation practice, educational strategies may represent one avenue for strengthening innovation readiness. In the Syrian context, strengthening innovation-oriented education and university-industry engagement may help cultivate innovation competencies and support the translation of research into practical applications.

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

Scalable Training of Spatially Grounded 2D Vision-Language Models for Radiology

We study how to train visually grounded vision-language models (VLMs) for radiology without manual spatial annotations. We introduce RefRad2D, a large-scale bilingual (German/English) dataset of 1.2M CT and MR image-text pairs derived from clinical practice, with task-specific VQA and spatial grounding subsets generated automatically via LLM-based curation and automated segmentation. Trained on this data, our model RadGrounder jointly performs report generation, visual question answering, and spatial grounding via bounding-box detection or segmentation. On external VQA benchmarks (Slake, VQA-RAD), RadGrounder achieves competitive results with specialized medical VLMs. Adding our clinical data to the training mixture improves open-ended VQA over fine-tuning on the downstream datasets alone, showing the transferability of our dataset. Crucially, adding grounding supervision does not degrade language quality, enabling spatially verifiable outputs at no cost to VQA performance.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

HistoRAG: Embedding Historical Methodology in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Through Critical Technical Practice

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the prevailing architecture for grounding language model outputs in external evidence, yet its dominant evaluation paradigms and default configurations remain oriented toward factual question-answering. For interpretive disciplines such as historical studies, RAG embeds assumptions that conflict with scholarly practice. We introduce HistoRAG, a framework that translates historiographical principles into concrete architectural interventions. Separated retrieval and generation decouples source discovery from interpretation, temporal windowing enforces balanced source representation across the research period as a methodological requirement of historical inquiry, and LLM-as-judge evaluation makes relevance judgments transparent and contestable. We evaluate these interventions using SPIEGELragged, applied to 102,189 articles from Der Spiegel (1950-1979). Each intervention addresses a measurable deficiency in standard RAG: era-specific vocabulary retrieves zero chunks from the 1950s when using 1970s terminology, evidence of the temporal skew that motivates windowing; vector similarity and LLM-assessed relevance correlate only weakly (Spearman rho = 0.275), motivating post-retrieval evaluation; and keyword-based and semantic retrieval surface largely disjoint source pools, motivating an architecture in which both operate as complementary retrieval layers under a shared LLM evaluation filter. We also introduce the concept of Zwischentexte (intermediate texts that function as interpretive proposals rather than findings) as a framework for responsible integration of LLM-generated text into scholarly practice. The architecture offers a model for how domain-specific epistemological commitments can be translated into RAG design decisions, and may transfer to other interpretive disciplines working with large corpora.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Adiabatically-induced Kawaguchi geometry and jerk in quantum-classical systems

arXiv:2606.16037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatically eliminating the quantum degrees of freedom in a mixed quantum-classical system produces an effective force in the classical equation of motion. The elimination can be made to any order in the adiabatic parameter, generating a series of higher order forces. By applying a sequence of near-identity unitary transformations to the quantum state, we derive a hierarchy of increasingly accurate effective actions for the classical variables. The third order Euler-Lagrange equation is non-Newtonian as the force depends on the jerk, the third order time derivative of position. We find that the third order terms induce a special kind of Kawaguchi geometry on the space of classical variables. This geometry is characterized by an almost symplectic structure and a differential line element that depends on the acceleration in addition to the velocity. Our results can be used to efficiently capture higher order nonadiabatic effects in molecular dynamics simulations.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

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

Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL): Benchmarking Weakly Supervised Learning for Aerial Wildlife Surveys

Automated aerial wildlife surveys increasingly rely on deep learning, yet standard object detectors require bounding-box annotations, reported to be up to seven times slower and three times more expensive to produce than point-level labels. To address this bottleneck, we introduce the Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL), a weakly supervised density-estimation framework with three variants: OWL-C, a fully convolutional model for high-throughput screening; OWL-T, a Swin-augmented hybrid for heterogeneous, cluttered scenes; and OWL-D, built on a frozen DINOv3 ViT-H+/16 encoder with a DPT-style fusion decoder. We benchmark all three against POLO, YOLOv11n, and YOLOv11l across five public aerial datasets, from sparse fixed-wing savanna surveys to dense UAV paddock imagery, and against the published HerdNet baseline on its native Delplanque split. OWL-D sets a new state of the art on Delplanque (0.934 AP vs. HerdNet's 0.840) and records the highest AP on four of the five datasets. Performance is regime-dependent: on the extreme-density SheepCounter UAV dataset the hybrid OWL-T leads (0.978 AP) and the convolutional variants attain the lowest counting error, whereas the foundation-based OWL-D degrades, indicating which variant suits which survey type. We further validate operational readiness on the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's 2022 Central Arctic Caribou census: under cross-herd and cross-temporal transfer, OWL-C fine-tuned on the 2017 Porcupine Caribou Herd split attains F1 = 0.965 on a held-out patch test set, with a signed count error of +3.1% aggregated across the released test patches. We release the OWL code, model weights, and the annotated Porcupine Caribou Herd 2017 (PCH) and Central Arctic Herd 2022 (CAH) patches, the first open patch-level datasets for large-scale caribou aerial surveys, at https://github.com/microsoft/MegaDetector-Overhead.

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

Continual Backdoor Training in IoT/CPS

arXiv:2606.14987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical systems (CPS) increasingly rely on continual learning (CL) to adapt to evolving environments, device heterogeneity, and concept drift, thereby improving overall utility. While continual adaptation is essential for long-lived IoT deployments where data patterns evolve, it also introduces new security vulnerabilities. In particular, backdoor attacks can exploit incremental updates, replay buffers, and representation reuse to implant persistent malicious behaviors that remain dormant during normal operation but activate upon specific triggers. In this paper, we present a backdoor attack in continual learning used in IoT/CPS systems. To this end, we formalize an IoT/CPS-specific threat model, analyze why continual learning amplifies backdoor persistence in IoT pipelines, and evaluate our technique under varying conditions. Our analysis highlights critical open challenges in securing lifelong learning in IoT/CPS and industrial IoT (IIoT) environments, as well as the need for heightened security controls.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Program Evaluation with Remotely Sensed Outcomes

arXiv:2411.10959v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study causal inference in experiments and quasi-experiments, where the economic outcome is imperfectly measured by a remotely sensed variable. The remotely sensed variable is low-cost, scalable, and predictive of the economic outcome in observational data; examples include satellite imagery and mobile phone activity. We model the remotely sensed variable as post-outcome: variation in the economic outcome causes variation in the remotely sensed variable. For example, changes in environmental quality cause changes in satellite imagery, not vice versa. Under this assumption, we propose a formula to nonparametrically identify the causal parameter by combining experimental and observational data. We develop a method for n^{-1/2} inference that is robust to misspecification and that does not restrict the algorithms used to process remotely sensed variables.

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

Bridging the Usability Gap: Lessons from Interpreting Studies for Machine Interpreting Design

Machine interpreting (MI), the live, real-time branch of speech translation, has achieved remarkable progress on standard benchmarks, with some systems approaching human parity on textual fidelity. Yet the user experience remains far inferior to interpreter-mediated communication, revealing what we term the accuracy illusion: systems that appear accurate on paper but fail in practice to support smooth, goal-oriented interaction. This paper defines MI as a distinct subfield of speech translation, with its own characteristics and the need for evaluation methods grounded in communicative effectiveness rather than isolated fidelity metrics. Drawing on insights from interpreting studies, we identify critical dimensions of professional interpreting practice that are overlooked by current systems, and consolidate them into three interdependent design priorities for future MI: agency (context-sensitive initiative and repair), grounding (multimodal and discourse-level situational awareness), and experience (adaptive improvement through real interaction). Together, these priorities chart a path toward closing the usability gap and enabling systems that can sustain authentic multilingual communication in real time.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Vine Codes: Low-Overhead Quantum LDPC Codes on a Planar Square Grid

arXiv:2606.20263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The surface code is a promising route towards large-scale quantum computing, requiring only nearest-neighbour gates amenable to superconducting hardware. However, surface codes incur large qubit overheads. Novel quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) codes promise to reduce overheads but require long-range connections that are difficult to achieve on superconducting platforms. Here, we introduce "Vine Codes" - qLDPC codes that are implementable on a planar square grid through nearest-neighbour, two-qubit gates native to superconducting platforms (iSWAP and CZ). Our approach generalises "Directional Codes" recently introduced by Gehér et. al. (2025) which are constrained to a torus. In contrast, vine codes have open boundary conditions constructed with the aid of routing qubits. We perform extensive numeric searches and find promising candidate vine codes, e.g. [[121,4,6]], [[221,6,7]], and [[234,9,6]] codes. We verify the circuit distances and show that data and measure qubits required can be reduced by up to ~28% relative to the surface code at a circuit distance of 7. Even including routing qubits, vine codes require fewer total qubits than the surface code (e.g. ~18% reduction at circuit distance 10) and benefits are expected to increase at higher distances. We perform circuit-level noise simulations to demonstrate that under a realistic noise model and at a near-term noise rate of $10^{-3}$, vine codes can perform better than the surface code while using fewer qubits. We give an exhaustive list of all unique vine codes up to stabiliser-weight 9. We additionally introduce "Flip-Vine Codes" which possess single-qubit transversal Clifford gates useful for fault-tolerant logic and magic state cultivation. We furthermore construct examples of generalised open boundaries for vine codes that go beyond the familiar X/Z boundaries of the surface and tile codes.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SalArt-VQA: Diagnosing Whether VLMs Understand Salient Artifacts in Generated Images

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to detect whether AI-generated images contain visible artifacts, yet their ability to analyze such artifacts remains poorly understood. A correct image-level decision can still hide important failures: a model may correctly flag an artifact while relying on the wrong visual cue, selecting the wrong region, or describing a defect that the image does not support. To evaluate these behaviors directly, we introduce SalArt-VQA, a diagnostic benchmark for fine-grained SALient ARTifact understanding in AI-generated images. SalArt-VQA contains 950 images and 3,681 human-authored multiple-choice questions spanning artifact images, matched real reference images, and paired generated reference images. Four aligned question types evaluate presence detection, semantic localization, spatial grounding, and evidence-grounded defect identification, while the reference splits test calibration and abstention when the annotated defect is absent. Across 20 VLMs, SalArt-VQA reveals failures that image-level detection accuracy hides: the strongest model reaches 99.37% detection recall on artifact images but answers all four artifact-side questions correctly on only 53.26% of images. Comparing artifact images with artifact-free references reveals a sensitivity-calibration tradeoff: sensitive models often make unsupported artifact claims, while conservative models avoid false alarms largely by missing real artifacts. These results show that high artifact detection accuracy alone does not imply grounded artifact understanding. SalArt-VQA exposes these hidden failure modes and provides a fine-grained evaluation of whether VLM artifact claims are supported by local visual evidence.

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

Failure Modes of Large Language Models on Research-Level Mathematics: A Taxonomy and an Empirical Characterisation

arXiv:2606.24902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The "First Proof" benchmark [1] posed ten research-level mathematics questions to the strongest publicly available LLMs and found them consistently wrong-not silent, but confidently, fluently wrong. This paper asks why. Working from the per-question post-mortems in First Proof's Appendix A, I identify four failure modes: citation fabrication (F1), premise smuggling (F2), silent problem reformulation (F3), and local-to-global compatibility gaps (F4). I then audit eight one-shot proofs generated by Gemini 2.5 Flash on Questions 1, 2, and 5 of the benchmark, using two instruments built specifically to surface F1 and F2. The central finding is uncomfortable for anyone who sees retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as the obvious fix: not one of the eight proofs contained a confirmed fabricated citation, yet every single one contained at least one load-bearing claim asserted as a "fundamental result" or "standard argument" with no justification attached. That failure mode-F2, premise smuggling-is invisible to citation verification by design. A premise-audit instrument I introduce flags it at 100% precision (5/5 judge-confirmed flags are true positives) and 50% proof-level recall in this corpus. The taxonomy and the audit together suggest that the right long-term objective is building inference-time pipelines that prevent these failure modes from occurring, not just detecting them after the fact. Index Terms–Large language models, mathematical reasoning, hallucination, premise smuggling, failure-mode taxonomy.

13.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Machine learning-driven identification of virulence determinants in <i>Borrelia burgdorferi</i> associated with human dissemination

by Hoa Thanh Nguyen, Catherine A. Brissette Lyme disease, the most common tick-borne infectious disease in the United States, presents with highly variable clinical outcomes, ranging from localized erythema migrans to severe disseminated complications affecting the heart, joints, and nervous system. The bacterial determinants underlying this phenotypic variation remain largely unknown, limiting our ability to predict disease progression and optimize treatment strategies. Here, we applied machine learning (ML) approaches to identify specific amino acid residues within surface-exposed virulence factors that predict human dissemination phenotypes. Utilizing the published whole genome sequences from 299 clinical Borrelia burgdorferi isolates collected from the United States and Slovenia over a 30-year period (1992–2021), we extracted and characterized translated amino acid sequences (variants) of seven known virulence factors (BB_0406, BBK32, DbpA, OspA, OspC, P66, and RevA). Protein variants were classified based on their association with disseminated versus localized infections using clinical metadata. Cramér’s V analysis revealed possible strong associations between dissemination phenotypes and five adhesins: BBK32, DbpA, OspC, P66, and RevA. We developed ML models using five algorithms with multiple feature selection strategies, achieving robust predictive performance for DbpA, OspC, and RevA variants (all performance metrics > 0.7). Feature importance analysis identified 57, 29, and 42 key predictive residues for DbpA, OspC, and RevA, respectively. Notably, B-cell epitope prediction revealed significant enrichment of ML-identified residues within predicted epitope regions for OspC (11 overlapping residues, OR = 3.57, p = 0.006) and RevA (12 overlapping residues, OR = 2.37, p = 0.048), suggesting these residues may influence immune recognition and bacterial persistence. This study establishes the first computational framework linking Borrelia protein sequence variants to clinical dissemination phenotypes, providing molecular insights into Lyme disease pathogenesis that may inform the development of improved diagnostics and therapeutic targets.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Do Vision-Language Models Understand 3D Scenes or Just Catalogue Objects?

arXiv:2605.20448v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models reliably name objects in a scene, but do they represent the 3D layout those objects inhabit? We introduce a 3,034-sample human-curated benchmark targeting three components of spatial understanding: depth-ordered occlusion (probed via three independent counterfactual operationalisations), optical-geometry inference over visible reflections, and volumetric rearrangement planning. Six frontier and open-weight VLMs, scored by trained annotators on 18,204 responses with no LLM-as-judge, reveal a sharp dissociation: models that plan rearrangements over visible layouts at 53–97% accuracy and rarely violate collision constraints fall to 6–45% on occlusion and below 7% on reflections. An embodied-reasoning model reproduces the same profile. White-box analysis on Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking localises the failure to the visual-token merger: spatial information recoverable throughout the vision encoder becomes inaccessible after token compression and only stabilises again when clean post-merger activations are patched into the language decoder.

15.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Comparative impacts and cost-effectiveness of tuberculosis systematic screening strategies in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru: A mathematical modeling study

作者:

by Yiran E. Liu, José Victor Bortolotto Bampi, Ronan F. Arthur, Argita D. Salindri, Caroline Busatto, Pedro Avedillo Jiménez, Daniele Maria Pelissari, Fernanda Dockhorn Costa Johansen, Robert Arana-Narvaez, Alvaro Fernando Moreno Roca, Wilfredo Santos Solís Tupes, Esther Mori Jiu, Christian Alfredo Moreno Roca, Erika Albertina Abregú Contreras, Valentina Antonieta Alarcón Guizado, Julián Trujillo Trujillo, Belkys Marcelino, Mónica Alonso Gonzalez, Mayra Cecilia Córdova Ayllon, Ted Cohen, Moises A. Huaman, Jeremy D. Goldhaber-Fiebert, Julio Croda, Jason R. Andrews Background Incarceration is a leading driver of tuberculosis in Latin America. Systematic screening in prisons may reduce tuberculosis burden, but optimal strategies and cost-effectiveness remain uncertain. We examined the population-wide health impacts and cost-effectiveness of systematic screening in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, comparing different timepoints, frequencies, and screening algorithms. Methods and findings Using dynamic transmission models calibrated to Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, we simulated annual or biannual (twice-yearly) prison-wide screening, alone or combined with entry and exit screening from 2026 to 2035. We evaluated four algorithms: (1) symptom screening, (2) chest X-ray with computer-aided detection (CXR-CAD), (3) symptoms and CXR-CAD (follow-up testing if either is positive), and (4) GeneXpert Ultra (Xpert) with pooled sputum. Individuals screening positive then received individual Xpert. We projected impacts on within-prison and population-level tuberculosis incidence in 2035, along with discounted costs (2023 US dollars) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Model projections showed that combined entry, exit, and biannual screening with CXR-CAD was highly impactful and cost-effective across countries, reducing tuberculosis incidence by 61%–87% in prisons and 18%–28% population-wide. Compared to only biannual CXR-CAD (the next best strategy), the incremental cost per DALY averted of adding entry and exit screening was $2,984 (Brazil), $2,925 (Colombia), and $645 (Peru). Adding symptom screening to CXR-CAD marginally increased benefit and was only cost-effective in Peru’s higher-incidence prisons. Biannual screening alone remained cost-effective at prison incidence levels well below national averages, as well as at far lower willingness-to-pay thresholds. In settings without CXR-CAD, pooled Xpert was an impactful, cost-effective alternative. Key limitations include the model’s simplified representation of tuberculosis disease states and lack of stratification by age, gender/sex, HIV, or drug resistance. Conclusions These modeling results support immediate national-level adoption of prison-wide tuberculosis screening twice-yearly and at entry and exit, using CXR-CAD or pooled Xpert.

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

Designing AI-Supported Focus Groups: A Role x Modality Playbook

arXiv:2606.11835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collecting participants' lived experiences is central to design research. Focus groups are uniquely valuable because participants not only share individual accounts but also respond to one another, surfacing comparison, disagreement, and collective sensemaking. However, focus groups are resource-intensive and highly sensitive to facilitation: moderators must probe for specificity, balance participation, manage topic flow, and sustain psychological safety, and subtle facilitation choices can shape what becomes salient. Recent HCI work and commercial meeting tools show that generative AI can scaffold live conversation through prompting, turn regulation, thematic mapping, and real-time summarization. Yet UXR teams lack a clear map of what these capabilities mean in focus groups and what methodological risks they introduce. We synthesize AI supports for live conversation and translate them into a focus-group-specific playbook organized by AI role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied).We synthesize prior work on AI-supported live conversation and propose a focus-group-specific playbook of AI supports organized by role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied). We characterize interactional trade-offs and identify open questions for evaluating AI-supported focus groups as methodological configurations.

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

Measurement noise limits the advantage of nonlinear models over linear models in biomedical prediction

arXiv:2606.18420v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On biomedical tabular data, flexible models such as deep networks, gradient-boosted trees, and kernel methods are repeatedly matched or beaten by linear and logistic regression given the same features. The usual reaction is to treat this as a model-side shortfall, to be fixed with more data, a better architecture, or tuning, on the assumption that the nonlinear structure is there and the model has failed to capture it. We argue that these fixes cannot help when the binding limit is the measurement rather than the model, as it frequently is in biomedicine. Additive noise blurs the population-optimal predictor, and because blurring removes a function's fine, rapidly varying detail before its broad shape, it erases nonlinear structure faster than linear structure. A degree-$k$ interaction is attenuated by the $k$-th power of feature reliability, while the linear part is attenuated only once. At the reliabilities typical of biomedical measurement, the nonlinear advantage can vanish even when the underlying biology is strongly nonlinear, and what the noise removes cannot be recovered by a larger cohort or a more flexible model, only by better measurement. The nonlinearity is hidden, not absent, and a tie between linear and flexible models is not by itself a verdict on the biology. These pieces are classical, drawn from measurement-error statistics, psychometrics, and Gaussian analysis, and we assemble them into an exact excess-risk identity. Measurement reliability is one of three conditions, alongside sample size and feature representation, that must align for a flexible model to help, and together they leave only a narrow window that most biomedical tasks fall outside. Across 140 UK Biobank tasks, the gap between flexible and linear models, where it exists, carries the predicted noise signature, and the three conditions can be separated by intervention but not by a benchmark alone.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Efficient Magic State Factory Via Transversal Non-Clifford Gate

arXiv:2606.16199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Magic-state preparation is a central component of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Recent theoretical and experimental successes in code-switch-based magic-state preparation have underscored the promise of these methods for quantum error correction. Similarly, magic-state cultivation has likewise been demonstrated in both numerical and experimental settings. However, a thorough comparison between magic-state cultivation and code-switch-based magic-state factories is still missing. In this work, we carry out end-to-end simulations of magic-state preparation using code switching and compare its resource requirements and performance against magic-state cultivation. As part of this analysis, we develop a lattice-surgery protocol for transfer between the doubled color code and the rotated surface code. We extend the complete code-switching protocol to the $d=5$ doubled color code and perform the corresponding end-to-end simulations. Finally, we propose two fault-tolerant magic-state preparation protocols that combine phase-kickback checks with a transversal non-Clifford gate.

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

Are Online Skill and Memory Modules Always Worth Their Tokens? A Budget-Constrained Study of Web Agents

Online web agents often augment a base actor with memory, workflow, or skill modules. These modules can improve performance, but they also consume test-time tokens, a cost rarely reported alongside the actor's inference cost. We study online augmentation, where this overhead is paid on every task, and re-evaluate its benefits under a fixed total inference budget. We compare AWM, ASI, and ReasoningBank with a token-matched vanilla baseline that uses the same budget for additional actor steps. Across three WebArena domains and three models, Gemini 3 Flash, GPT-5.4-mini, and Qwen 3.6-27B, the vanilla baseline matches or surpasses all three augmentation methods in aggregate success rate while often using fewer total tokens. We observe a similar trend on WorkArena-L1 with Qwen 3.6-27B, indicating that the effect extends to enterprise knowledge-work tasks. Our results suggest that skills and workflow memory can be useful in specific domains, but their apparent gains often vanish against a budget-matched actor. We further show that run-to-run variance materially affects outcomes and should be reported as a core evaluation criterion for online web agents.

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

IndicContextEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context Utilisation in Audio Large Language Models Across 8 Indic Languages

AudioLLMs enable speech recognition conditioned on textual prompts such as domain descriptions or entity lists. However, it remains unclear whether these models genuinely utilise such context or rely on parametric knowledge learned during pretraining. Existing benchmarks cannot answer this question because they evaluate transcription under fixed prompting conditions and rarely include explicit contextual inputs. We introduce IndicContextEval, a 56-hour multilingual benchmark of natural speech from 555 speakers across 8 Indian languages and 23 professional domains. We design a 7-level prompting framework that progressively introduces contextual signals, including metadata, natural-language descriptions, entity lists in English and native script, and adversarial prompts with incorrect entities. Evaluating five models reveals substantial differences in context utilisation behaviour, highlighting the need for explicit evaluation of contextual grounding in AudioLLMs.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

The classical boundaries of the EPR argument and quantum ontology

arXiv:2606.07826v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Von Neumann's Hilbert-space formalism of quantum mechanics constitutes a logico-physical theory of observed or measured reality. Imposing the logical constraint of Booleanity, essential for objectively shareable descriptions among observers, reveals the physical meaning of classicality inherently embedded within the formalism itself. Starting from this consideration, the present work reformulates the quantum-classical transition via Hilbert-space classical mechanics (HCM), grounding classicality not in the dynamical limit ($\hbar \to 0$), but in the logical constraint of Booleanity (i.e., the mutual commutativity of preparable states). Within this state-centric framework, applying the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) criterion alongside locality and measurement independence reduces standard quantum mechanics to the HCM model. Thus, the EPR argument reveals not quantum incompleteness, but the implicit classical boundaries of its own premises. To resolve this impasse, we articulate a nuanced quantum ontology grounded in a fundamental structural bipartition between the observational environment and the observed object, which accommodates three categorical distinctions: ontic, processional, and tropos-existential. Building on this, we propose a criterion of objective reality wherein descriptive objectivity is treated as merely a sufficient condition for physical reality. This addresses the historical Bohr-Einstein ambiguity, enabling the quantum formalism to ontologically unify objective measured phenomena and non-objective observed interference within a context-dependent framework.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Escaping the Cognitive Well: Efficient Competition Math with Off-the-Shelf Models

arXiv:2602.16793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the past year, custom and unreleased math reasoning models reached gold medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Similar performance was then reported using large-scale inference on publicly available models but at prohibitive costs (e.g., 3000 USD per problem). In this work, we present an inference pipeline that attains best-in-class performance on IMO-style math problems at an average inference cost orders of magnitude below competing methods while using only general-purpose off-the-shelf models. Our method relies on insights about grader failure in solver-grader pipelines, which we call the Cognitive Well (iterative refinement converging to a wrong solution that the solver as well as the pipeline's internal grader consider to be basically correct). Our pipeline addresses these failure modes through conjecture extraction, wherein candidate lemmas are isolated from generated solutions and independently verified alongside their negations in a fresh environment (context detachment). On IMO-ProofBench Advanced (PB-Adv), our pipeline achieves 67.1 percent performance using Gemini 3.0 Pro with an average cost per question of approximately 31 USD. At the time of evaluation, this represented the state-of-the-art on PB-Adv among both public and unreleased models, and more than doubles the success rate of the next best publicly accessible pipeline, all at a fraction of the cost.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Bounded Context Management for Tabular Foundation Models on Stream Learning

arXiv:2606.18677v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tabular stream learning requires predictions on sequentially arriving examples under distribution shift. While standard methods adapt by updating model states, tabular foundation models (TFMs) make predictions conditioned on a labeled context in an in-context manner, making them a natural alternative for stream learning. This shifts the challenge from how to update the model to how to manage the context. We propose a future information view that yields three practical requirements for context management: preserve recent examples, retain uncertain examples, and remove redundant examples. We instantiate these requirements as CURE (Context management via Uncertainty-aware admission and Redundancy aware Eviction), a context-managing policy with entropy-gated admission and redundancy-aware eviction. Across seven streams, CURE shows up to 27.0% relative improvement over classical stream learners, remains robust across multiple TFM backbones, and ranks first among other policy variants. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/morcellinus/CURE-ICML-FMSD.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

The Morse Transform for Discrete Shape Analysis

arXiv:2503.04507v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The geometry of an object plays a vital role in modulating its interactions with the physical world. It nevertheless remains difficult to describe geometric information numerically for the purposes of statistical inference or classification tasks. Here, we introduce a new topological transform which leverages directional piecewise-linear Morse theory to quantify the geometry of an embedded object by cataloguing critical points across multiple height-functions. The output of this Morse transform records both the heights and the local topological type (peak, trough or saddle) of the critical points that characterise the underlying shape, retaining finer information than the Euler characteristic transform whilst naturally prioritising a shape's outermost regions. Crucially, this output can be further compressed into a rich but compact feature vector. We benchmark the Morse feature vector as a descriptor for ligand-based virtual screening (LBVS), which intrinsically depends on the shape of molecules. Under a common gradient-boosted tree classification pipeline, Morse descriptors achieve the highest mean AUROC when compared to other topological transform descriptors and to standard shape-based LBVS descriptors.

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arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Multi-Field Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Maritime Accident Root Cause Analysis

arXiv:2606.13249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Maritime accident adjudication reports contain critical tribunal findings for root cause analysis (RCA), yet retrieving relevant precedents and drafting consistent reports from decades of records remains labor-intensive. This paper proposes a multi-field hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for automated maritime RCA, utilizing a comprehensive dataset of 13,329 Korea Maritime Safety Tribunal (KMST) reports (1971-2025). We transform raw adjudications into a structured knowledge base of "incident cards", indexing three distinct fields-Summary, Causes, and Disposition-alongside a hierarchical L1/L2 cause taxonomy. Our retrieval strategy employs a field-aware hybrid approach, fusing sparse and dense rankings via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). Given the lack of large-scale expert relevance labels, we evaluate retrieval performance using ceiling-normalized recall and nDCG based on a metadata-derived proxy relevance score. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed retrieval significantly outperforms baseline methods, improving NormRecall@100 from 0.18 to 0.55. Furthermore, grounding the generator on the retrieved precedents enhances RCA generation quality over an LLM-only baseline, increasing the LLM-as-a-judge score from 3.34 to 3.72. These findings suggest that field-aware RAG can substantially streamline maritime safety investigation workflows by enabling faster precedent search and more consistent, evidence-based RCA drafting.