01.
Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily
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02.
arXiv (CS.CV)
2026-06-24
ObsGraph: Hierarchical Observation Representation for Embodied Reasoning and Exploration
作者:
Embodied reasoning and exploration are increasingly considered crucial abilities for robots operating in complex and unfamiliar environments. To accomplish tasks in such settings, an agent must identify and acquire the information necessary for the task through exploration. We propose ObsGraph, an observation-centric hierarchical scene graph that unifies scene representation, retrieval, and exploration. It retains visual evidence and organizes it into room-view-object layers: rooms provide coarse semantic anchors, views preserve contextual object covisibility, and objects store fine-grained details. On top of this representation, we perform coarse-to-fine hierarchical retrieval under a bounded budget, and crucially use retrieval outcomes to structure the exploration candidate space–activating room-level exploration, view refinement, or frontier exploration–thereby tightly coupling representation, retrieval, and adaptive multi-scale exploration. Experiments across embodied reasoning and exploration benchmarks demonstrate improved success and efficiency, highlighting the benefits of structured scene representation and more targeted information gathering driven by identified evidence gaps.
03.
arXiv (CS.CV)
2026-06-12
Augmentation techniques for video surveillance in the visible and thermal spectral range
作者:
In intelligent video surveillance, cameras record image sequences during day and night. Commonly, this demands different sensors. To achieve a better performance it is not unusual to combine them. We focus on the case that a long-wave infrared camera records continuously and in addition to this, another camera records in the visible spectral range during daytime and an intelligent algorithm supervises the picked up imagery. More accurate, our task is multispectral CNN-based object detection. At first glance, images originating from the visible spectral range differ between thermal infrared ones in the presence of color and distinct texture information on the one hand and in not containing information about thermal radiation that emits from objects on the other hand. Although color can provide valuable information for classification tasks, effects such as varying illumination and specialties of different sensors still represent significant problems. Anyway, obtaining sufficient and practical thermal infrared datasets for training a deep neural network poses still a challenge. That is the reason why training with the help of data from the visible spectral range could be advantageous, particularly if the data, which has to be evaluated contains both visible and infrared data. However, there is no clear evidence of how strongly variations in thermal radiation, shape, or color information influence classification accuracy. To gain deeper insight into how Convolutional Neural Networks make decisions and what they learn from different sensor input data, we investigate the suitability and robustness of different augmentation techniques...
04.
arXiv (CS.AI)
2026-06-11
From Uniform to Learned Graph Priors: Diffusion for Structure Discovery
作者:
arXiv:2606.11831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural relational inference (NRI) methods discover interaction graphs from trajectories through variational reasoning on discrete potential edges. However, these methods typically rely on oversimplified, factorized graph priors. Such priors, typically nearing uniform distributions, treat edges as independent entities. This systemic misalignment does not match the real-world systems and yields diffuse and indecisive edge posteriors limiting the reliability of structural discovery. To address this, we propose Diff-prior, a diffusion-parameterized adaptive prior used to calibrate latent graph distribution rather than generate graphs. Our core insight is to reframe prior integration as a learnable denoising-style calibration that organizes scattered, uncertain edge posteriors into a more reliable overall structure which can be trained by the diffusion model. Diff-prior learns an adaptive structure prior that performs structured calibration on the edge posteriors during inference, guiding it towards a distribution closer to the underlying structure. The diff-prior operates before structural sampling and acts as a denoising calibrator directly on the encoder edge distribution, which provides a generic training paradigm over structured variables. Experiments on standard benchmarks validated our framework, and the results indicate that Diff-prior improves the performance of structure inference and generates more decisive edge posteriors across multiple NRI-family architectures. The code is available on https://github.com/Hardy158118/Diffprior.
05.
arXiv (quant-ph)
2026-06-19
Faking entanglement with imperceptible measurement deviations
作者:
arXiv:2606.20396v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum entanglement is a central resource underpinning emerging quantum technologies, enabling capabilities beyond those of classical systems. Accurate verification of entanglement is therefore crucial. However, experimental schemes usually rely on the assumption that quantum measurements can be realized exactly. As the complexity of a quantum system grows, this assumption typically becomes increasingly unrealistic, therefore leading to a widening mismatch between theoretical models and experimental implementations. Here we demonstrate that arbitrarily small measurement errors, when adversarially encoded in the measurement apparatus, can lead to the false certification of high-dimensional entanglement in systems that are, in fact, separable. This is achieved by introducing explicit hacking attacks to measurement devices in well-established entanglement verification tests. We further experimentally demonstrate this effect using classical photonic states encoded in the spatial degree of freedom, spanning up to 61 dimensions with measurement fidelity errors as low as 0.23%. Our results uncover a fundamental vulnerability in current methods for high-dimensional entanglement detection, highlighting the susceptibility of complex quantum devices to small adversarial perturbations. The findings underscore the need for developing secure verification of quantum information that is robust to bounded discrepancies between theory and experiment.
06.
Nature (Science)
2026-06-12
Humans outperform AI at this highly rigorous mathematics test
作者:
A new benchmark pitting AI against previously unseen maths problems shows systems still fall short of top human expertise. A new benchmark pitting AI against previously unseen maths problems shows systems still fall short of top human expertise.
07.
arXiv (CS.LG)
2026-06-16
Reinforcement Learning for LLM-based Event Forecasting
作者:
arXiv:2606.15917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a recently devised sample and memory efficient reinforcement learning method, to finetune pretrained LLMs in the range of 1.5B to 14B parameters equipped with the ability to get current information through the use of a Wikipedia revisions tool, or news summaries, to forecast real events beyond the knowledge cutoff of the LLM, as well as problems made to simulate different aspects of the dynamics of that training. We use the results of these experiments to comment on the scaling capability of LLMs for forecasting, as well as classify how judgmental forecasting fits into the verifiable/unverifiable domain taxonomy, considering the impact of the inherent aleatoric uncertainty when forecasting future events (e.g. the roll of a die). As a result of the GRPO training, we manage to bring a 1.5B parameter transformer (Qwen 2.5 1.5B) to forecasting performance superior to Claude Sonnet 3.5 over the same dataset as measured by cross entropy from the market agreed probabilities. We also discuss various dead ends on the path to this result.
08.
arXiv (CS.CL)
2026-06-24
The African Language Tax: Quantifying the Cost, Latency, and Context Penalty of Tokenizing African Languages in Frontier LLMs
作者:
Commercial large language models bill, scale latency, and budget context per token. Yet tokenizers assign more subword tokens to the same meaning in some languages than in others, so speakers of languages with high token-fertility pay a structural penalty before a model is ever invoked. This penalty is documented for multilingual settings in general, but it has not been measured systematically for African languages at the level of enterprise deployment economics and cognitive context capacity. We measure it across 20 African languages spanning five language families and three scripts (Latin, Ge'ez/Ethiopic, N'Ko; 19 appear in the primary FLORES-200+ corpus, with Nigerian Pidgin measured via MAFAND-MT only), using parallel corpora so that the language effect is isolated from content. Across 11 frontier and open tokenizers on FLORES-200+, every African language carries a tokenization premium above English (median 1.88x on GPT-5 / o200k_base, up to 8.92x for N'Ko); the penalty is largest for Ethiopic and N'Ko scripts (reaching 7-9x) and is near-invariant across corpora (FLORES vs SIB-200 Pearson r = 0.9998). Translated into deployment terms, this results in up to 8.9x inference cost and an equivalent generation-latency multiplier (N'Ko vs English on GPT-5; 7.4x for Amharic), and as little as 11% of English's effective context window. The best currently available tokenizer for African languages, Gemma 4, reduces the mean premium from 3.31x (cl100k_base) to 2.38x, but no tokenizer eliminates the penalty. We release an open measurement tool (afri-fertility), a public leaderboard, a results dataset, and mitigation guidance for African builders. The penalty falls hardest on the languages whose speakers can least afford it, a digital divide encoded directly into the subword vocabulary.
09.
arXiv (CS.CV)
2026-06-18
Performance Gap Analysis between Latin and Arabic Scripts HTR
作者:
Recent studies have shown that handwritten text recognition (HTR) systems perform worse on Arabic-script datasets than on Latin-script data. However, the reasons for this gap are still not well understood due to the lack of controlled comparisons. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of Arabic and Latin scripts HTR using a unified CRNN model for line-level HTR across nine datasets (including KHATT (Arabic), Muharaf (Arabic), NUST-UHWR (Urdu), PHTD (Persian), IAM (English), READ-2016 (German), and others) and di ferent training sizes (K in {100, 500, 1000, 2000, ..., Kfull}). Our results show the performance gap remains: it is large in low-resource settings, decreases with more data, but remains even at full scale, with a consistent difference of 5-7 CER points. We show that annotation quality matters, as many datasets contain labeling errors. Cleaning reduces error rates and narrows the gap, but does not eliminate it. In addition, we find that a fixed number of training samples provides less effective coverage in Arabic due to higher visual variability, requiring more data to learn similar representations. We compare recognition across datasets in terms of the number of text lines and the number of characters, showing an equivalence trade-off. We compare character frequency distributions across scripts and show that Arabic is significantly more heavy-tailed than Latin. Our error analysis reveals that around 30 percent of substitution errors in Arabic datasets (e.g., KHATT) are caused by confusion between visually similar characters, compared to about 15 percent in Latin-script datasets such as IAM.
10.
arXiv (CS.AI)
2026-06-12
CRAFTIIF: Cross-Resolution Analytic Four-Type Interpretable Isolation Forest for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection
作者:
arXiv:2606.13486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anomaly detection in multivariate time series is challenged by four structurally distinct anomaly types – point (isolated spikes), distributional (level shifts), temporal (rhythm changes), and collective (inter-sensor correlation breakdowns) – each requiring different feature representations. Most unsupervised methods target only one or two types and provide limited interpretability. We present CRAFTIIF (Cross-Resolution Analytic Four-Type Interpretable Isolation Forest), a fully unsupervised framework targeting all four types without dataset-specific tuning. CRAFTIIF generates K=500 random analytic wavelet feature draws across four families (Morlet, DOG, Haar, Coiflet), each targeting a specific anomaly type, feeding five structured Isolation Forests – one per type plus a meta-IF for compound anomalies. An adaptive Otsu/MAD threshold calibrates detection automatically across anomaly rates from 0.1% to 69.2%. Because each IF is trained exclusively on type-specific features, branch firing provides direct anomaly-type attribution by construction, without post-hoc explanation. Evaluated on all 19 datasets of the mTSBench benchmark (Zhou et al., TMLR 2026), CRAFTIIF achieves mean F1=0.228 (all 19 datasets) and F1=0.322 (13 detectable datasets), ranking first among all 25 evaluated methods on VUS-PR (0.463 vs. previous best 0.329, +40.7%). A diagnostic framework – oracle F1, detectability limits, and branch separation ratios – identifies 6 of 19 datasets as fundamentally undetectable by any unsupervised method. Ablation over 11 conditions confirms adaptive thresholding (+38% F1), four-branch structure (+20%), and meta-IF (+23%) are each essential. Code: https://github.com/smitswil/craftiif
11.
arXiv (CS.LG)
2026-06-18
Beyond AHI: An Interpretable Causal-Discovery-Guided Framework for Sleep Recovery in Connected Health
作者:
arXiv:2606.18506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Objective sleep assessment relies on polysomnography (PSG), yet clinical impact is often better reflected in patient-reported outcomes (PROs) such as sleepiness and fatigue. Existing summary indices, including the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI), provide limited insight into the multidomain physiology underlying functional recovery. We propose an interpretable, causal-discovery–guided framework for deriving a hierarchical Sleep Recovery Score (SRS) from multimodal PSG. Using two large population cohorts (MESA: n=1540; MrOS: n=825), we apply directed acyclic graph (DAG) learning to identify candidate physiological drivers spanning respiratory burden, hypoxic burden, sleep fragmentation, sleep architecture, and autonomic regulation. Although derived from clinical PSG, these domains map naturally to sensing streams increasingly available in connected health technologies, including wearable ECG, oximetry, and sleep-stage estimation devices. To preserve mechanistic plausibility, we introduce a two-stage screening process that combines physiology-based constraints with constrained LLM-assisted auditing to identify and remove structural confounders and construct-overlapping variables. Across cohorts, these five domains emerge as recurrent physiological domains associated with recovery, and the resulting SRS shows up to 2.5$\times$ stronger alignment with perceived recovery than AHI. By linking multimodal sleep physiology to patient-centered outcomes through an interpretable, bias-aware, and domain structured framework, this work provides a practical foundation for recovery modeling across both clinical sleep studies and emerging smart and connected health settings.
12.
arXiv (quant-ph)
2026-06-17
Entanglement dynamics for atoms near a reflecting boundary: Enhancement and suppression by environment-induced interactions
作者:
arXiv:2602.23773v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate how environment-induced interactions influence the entanglement dynamics of two atoms held at fixed positions near a perfectly reflecting boundary. Within the framework of open quantum systems, we explicitly incorporate the environment-induced energy shifts, including both atom-boundary contributions and an environment-induced atom-atom interaction, which are often neglected in previous studies. We show that, for any initial two-atom state, these energy-shift effects qualitatively and quantitatively modify the entanglement dynamics relative to treatments that omit them. Depending on the geometry and parameter regime, the environment-induced interactions can either enhance entanglement generation – yielding a larger maximum concurrence and a longer entanglement lifetime – or suppress it, reducing both the peak concurrence and the survival time. This behavior contrasts sharply with the free-space case, where the environment-induced atom-atom interaction affects entanglement generation only for a restricted class of initial states and does so in an exclusively assisting manner.
13.
arXiv (CS.LG)
2026-06-16
Towards a Unified Generative Model for Scarce Time Series with Domain Experts
作者:
arXiv:2606.15172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthesizing realistic time series with generative models has wide-ranging applications in real-world scenarios. Despite recent progress, most existing methods are trained under the assumption of abundant training data, which substantially limits their effectiveness in data-scarce settings. In this paper, we propose TimeMoDE, a novel framework that integrates Diffusion Transformers with Mixture-of-Experts to exploit both domain adaptability and diffusion-stage awareness for time series generation under data scarcity. It is pre-trained on a large-scale collection of multi-domain datasets to extract domain-agnostic temporal representations and domain-specific information benefiting generalization during fine-tuning. We propose Domain Prompts to condition expert assignment for indistinguishable noised tokens, mitigating the limitations of capturing inter-dataset relationships. Moreover, we incorporate diffusion timestep signals to equip the experts with awareness of time series degradation variations, facilitating adaptive calibrate to stage-dependent denoising requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeMoDE outperforms existing methods under diverse low-data settings. It establishes an innovative paradigm for advanced time series few-shot generation.
14.
medRxiv (Medicine)
2026-06-22
Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices Regarding Maternal Nutrition Counselling Among Frontline Health Workers in Udupi, Karnataka, India: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed-Methods Study
作者:
…
Background Indias maternal nutrition profile is undergoing a dual-direction shift, with persistent undernutrition coexisting alongside rising overweight and micronutrient deficiencies. Despite national efforts through Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and the National Health Mission (NHM), maternal dietary diversity remains suboptimal in India. Frontline health workers (FLWs) play a central role in delivering nutrition counselling; however, gaps remain between knowledge and its translation into practice, highlighting the need to strengthen training, applied competencies, and health system support within primary care settings. Objective To assess knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) regarding maternal nutrition counselling among FLWs and to explore contextual factors influencing counselling delivery. Methods A sequential explanatory mixed-methods study was conducted in Udupi, Karnataka, India. In phase one, 46 FLWs- Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), Community Health Officers (CHO), and Primary Health Care Officers (PHCO) completed a validated Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) questionnaire. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Kruskal-Wallis test, Spearman correlation, and exploratory multiple linear regression. In phase two, one focus group discussion with 21 participants was conducted and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results FLWs demonstrated moderate KAP scores (37.50 {+/-} 5.09), with lower scores observed in dietary diversity knowledge and counselling practices. CHOs and PHCOs had significantly higher knowledge (p < 0.001) and practice scores (p = 0.002) compared to ASHAs, while attitudes were similar across cadres. Knowledge was positively associated with practice ({rho} = 0.389, p = 0.008). Exploratory regression indicated that cadre and knowledge were associated with practice, while attitude was not statistically significant. Qualitative findings suggested that counselling was largely protocol-based and constrained by workload, limited counselling tools, economic barriers, and cultural food practices. Conclusion Despite positive attitudes towards maternal nutrition counselling, frontline health workers demonstrated gaps in knowledge and counselling practices. Mixed-methods findings suggest that counselling delivery is shaped by both provider competencies and health-system constraints, highlighting the need for implementation-focused strategies to strengthen maternal nutrition counselling in routine antenatal care.
15.
medRxiv (Medicine)
2026-06-15
Genome-wide colocalization of body fat distribution GWAS and subcutaneous adipose eQTLs identifies SNX10, DGKQ, and CBX3 as candidate causal genes for cardiometabolic disease
作者:
Background: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified hundreds of loci associated with body fat distribution, yet the causal genes and regulatory mechanisms through which these variants exert their effects remain largely unknown. Expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) colocalization provides a powerful framework for identifying genes whose expression is genetically coregulated with complex traits. Methods: We performed a genome-wide colocalization analysis integrating waist-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (WHRadjBMI) GWAS summary statistics from 694,649 individuals (Pulit et al., 2019) with subcutaneous adipose tissue eQTLs from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Project v8 (N = 581 donors). GWAS coordinates were lifted from GRCh37 to GRCh38 to enable direct alignment with GTEx data. We incorporated CAVIAR fine-mapping results to overcome the limitation of FDR-significant eQTL filtering. Colocalization was assessed using the approximate Bayes factor framework (coloc.abf) across 335 independent genome-wide significant loci. Results: Of 2,897 locus-gene pairs tested, 489 (16.9%) showed strong colocalization (PP.H4 > 0.8) and 618 (21.3%) showed moderate evidence (PP.H4 > 0.5). The strongest colocalization was observed for SNX10 (sorting nexin 10; PP.H4 = 1.000), a recently characterized regulator of adipocyte differentiation and female-specific diet-induced obesity. Other top hits included DGKQ (diacylglycerol kinase theta; PP.H4 = 0.9999999), an emerging pharmacological target for insulin resistance, and CBX3 (chromobox 3; PP.H4 = 0.9999974), an epigenetic regulator linked to cardiovascular disease. Established adiposity genes including GRB14 (PP.H4 = 0.681) and KLF14 (PP.H4 = 0.590) were recovered, validating our approach. Several loci exhibited extensive allelic heterogeneity, with 50 genes colocalizing at a single chromosome 3 locus. Conclusions: Our analysis provides a comprehensive map of adipose tissue gene regulatory mechanisms underlying genetic risk for body fat distribution. The identification of SNX10, DGKQ, and CBX3 as high-confidence candidate causal genes advances the translation of GWAS associations into mechanistic understanding and therapeutic targets for obesity-related cardiometabolic disease.
16.
arXiv (CS.CV)
2026-06-24
A Benchmark of State-Space Models vs. Transformers and BiLSTM-based Models for Historical Newspaper OCR
作者:
End-to-end OCR for historical newspapers remains challenging, as models must handle long text sequences, degraded print quality, and complex layouts. While Transformer-based recognizers dominate current research, their quadratic complexity limits efficient paragraph-level transcription and large-scale deployment. We investigate linear-time State-Space Models (SSMs), specifically Mamba, as a scalable alternative to Transformer-based sequence modeling for OCR. We present to our knowledge, the first OCR architecture based on SSMs, combining a CNN visual encoder with bi-directional and autoregressive Mamba sequence modeling, and conduct a large-scale benchmark comparing SSMs with Transformer- and BiLSTM-based recognizers. Multiple decoding strategies (CTC, autoregressive, and non-autoregressive) are evaluated under identical training conditions alongside strong neural baselines (VAN, DAN, DANIEL) and widely used off-the-shelf OCR engines (PERO-OCR, Tesseract OCR, TrOCR, Gemini). Experiments on historical newspapers from the Bibliotheque nationale du Luxembourg, with newly released >99% verified gold-standard annotations, and cross-dataset tests on Fraktur and Antiqua lines, show that all neural models achieve low error rates (~2% CER), making computational efficiency the main differentiator. Mamba-based models maintain competitive accuracy while halving inference time and exhibiting superior memory scaling (1.26x vs 2.30x growth at 1000 chars), reaching 6.07% CER at the severely degraded paragraph level compared to 5.24% for DAN, while remaining 2.05x faster. We release code, trained models, and standardized evaluation protocols to enable reproducible research and guide practitioners in large-scale cultural heritage OCR available at https://github.com/MarcoPerson/ssm-ocr-benchmark.
17.
medRxiv (Medicine)
2026-06-16
Optimal Clinical Trials Platform for Progressive Multiple Sclerosis (OCTOPUS): protocol for an international, multi-arm, multi-stage, platform, randomized controlled, double-blind, phase 3 clinical trial.
作者:
…
Introduction Current treatments for multiple sclerosis (MS) do not address the pathological processes of neurodegeneration and chronic demyelination. This, coupled with the significant challenges of translating promising phase 2 results to phase 3 trial success, highlights the need for more efficient trial designs, such as platform multi-arm multi-stage (MAMS) trial approaches. MAMS trials have demonstrated success in areas such as oncology and infectious diseases. They are typified by a statistically robust core trial design that allows the addition of further treatment arms and utilisation of interim outcome analyses at pre-defined timepoints, to determine whether to terminate a treatment arm early or proceed to the final outcome analysis. To address the challenges in progressive multiple sclerosis (PMS) treatment discovery, the Optimal Clinical Trials Platform for PMS (OCTOPUS) trial was developed. It currently utilises MRI whole-brain atrophy as its interim outcome measure and the clinically relevant composite Expanded Disability Status Scale Plus (EDSS-Plus) as its final outcome measure. A rigorous and systematic drug selection process that assessed preclinical in vitro and animal model evidence, along with additional human data, led to the prioritisation of R/S-alpha lipoic acid (R/S-ALA) and metformin for testing against placebo, targeting pathobiological mechanisms relevant to PMS. All participants will be eligible to receive the current standard of care, including disease-modifying treatments (DMTs). Method and analysis OCTOPUS will be a multi-centre, randomised, placebo-controlled, double-blind, phase 3, MAMS trial of participants aged 25 to 70 years (inclusive) with PMS and an EDSS score of 4.0 to 8.0 (inclusive). Steady progression must be the major cause of increasing disability rather than relapse in the preceding 2 years. In the trial s first candidate drug cycle, participants will be allocated to R/S-ALA, metformin, or placebo in a 1:1:1 ratio. Cycle 1 active treatments will start as R/S-ALA 600 mg once daily, increased after 4 weeks to 600 mg twice daily, or metformin 1 g once daily, increased after 4 weeks to 1 g twice daily. The trial will be multinational, with participation from 28 hospitals across the UK and 10 hospitals in Australia. Clinician-reported measures will include: the EDSS-Plus and the individual components: EDSS, Timed 25 Foot Walk (T25FW); 9 Hole Peg Test (9HPT); Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT); Sloan Low Contrast Visual Acuity (SLCVA); and Relapse assessment. Patient-reported outcomes include MS specific walking, fatigue, pain, and impact scales. We will include a health economic analysis. Analysis stage 1 will require randomisation of 125 participants per arm and utilise MRI percentage brain volume change (PBVC) with the Structural Image Evaluation using Normalisation of Atrophy (SIENA) technique from baseline to 78 weeks. A positive outcome in analysis stage 1 will detect a 0.15% per year whole brain atrophy difference with a one-sided alpha of 0.35 and power of 95%, ensuring a low probability of erroneously rejecting a treatment arm at this stage. Any arms that show a positive effect will proceed to final analysis stage 2. Analysis stage 2 will require 600 participants per arm. Participants included in stage 1 will also be included in the stage 2. Analysis stage 2 will evaluate time to 6-month confirmed disability progression in the EDSS-Plus, in order to detect a 25% hazard ratio reduction with 90% power and an alpha of 0.05. Assuming one treatment arm proceeds to analysis stage 2, the trial will recruit approximately 1,200 participants and last about 6 years. This is approximately two-thirds the size and half the duration of separately conducted two-arm phase 2 and 3 trials. Ethics and dissemination The protocol was approved by the London Hampstead REC (22/LO/0622). This manuscript is based on protocol version 8.0, 28th August 2025. The findings of this trial will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations. There will be a close communication strategy developed with the UK MS Society (MSS) and full patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE). Trial registration ISRCTN: 14048364 EudraCT number: 2021-003034-37 CTA 20363/0445 IRAS number: 1003943 Secondary identifying numbers: ND001, CPMS 54274 Strengths and limitations - The OCTOPUS trial will be the first platform multi-arm multi-stage phase 3 trial in PMS, offering the potential to significantly expedite clinical trial processes with advantages in cost- and time-efficiency, focusing specifically on the poorly treated pathobiological processes of chronic neurodegeneration and demyelination - It will begin by assessing two promising drug candidates, immediate-release metformin and R/S-ALA, and will expand over the duration of the trial to include more drug arms under the same trial master protocol - The flexible and statistically robust trial design means that several components of the design (such as the early analysis stage 1 interim outcome) can be updated in line with evolving scientific knowledge - It will ultimately be the largest ever investigator-initiated phase 3 trial in PMS - It will include a range of national and international trial sites, including neuroscience centres and district general hospitals - It will have a high inclusion limit for age (up to 70 years) and disability (up to EDSS 8.0) - Several components (the telephone EDSS and virtual patient-reported outcome measures) will be amenable to remote collection increasing inclusivity and thus addressing public and participant suggestions, while minimising the risk of missing data - The main challenges in this trial design are the statistical and methodological complexity involved in design and implementation, and interpretation of interim trial results. Conclusion The trial launched cycle 1 in January 2023. Analysis stage 1 recruitment of 375 participants was achieved in November 2024, enabling planned interim analysis stage 1 to be conducted by late 2026 (Figure 1). On the 1st of June 2026, in the UK, 24 sites are active with a further 4 in set-up as part of stage 2, and in the Australian extension, Platform Adaptive Trial for Remyelination and Neuroprotection in Multiple Sclerosis (PLATYPUS), 1 site is active, with 9 additional sites in set-up.
18.
arXiv (CS.CL)
2026-06-16
ACCORD: Action-Conditioned Contextual Grounding for Language Agents
作者:
User instructions are often underspecified because humans rely on implicit assumptions about the surrounding environment. For large language model (LLM) agents operating in information-rich digital and physical environments, these assumptions cannot be inferred from the instruction alone; they must be recovered from the current state of tools, data, interfaces, and observations. Effective execution therefore requires agents to identify missing context, ground it in observed evidence, and carry it forward into subsequent actions. We show that current agents often fail to do so. They act from assumed rather than observed specifics, overlook information they could have gathered, and fail to incorporate evidence that has already been returned. Building on this insight, we propose ACCORD (Action-Conditioned Contextual Grounding), a simple and effective agent framework for adaptive grounding. Before each action, ACCORD actively probes the environment for missing information and integrates relevant context from the agent's trajectory that would otherwise be overlooked. Requiring no additional training or task-success signals, ACCORD improves task-goal completion on AppWorld by up to +20.6 points with GPT-5-mini, from 42.0% to 62.6%, compared to strong baselines. These gains persist with a substantially stronger base model (+10.8 with Claude-4.5-sonnet), an open-weight model (+10.1 with Qwen3.5-27B-FP8), and on the embodied AlfWorld benchmark (+7.4 success rate with GPT-5-mini).
19.
arXiv (math.PR)
2026-06-11
Convergence of a Critical Multitype Bellman–Harris Process with One Infinite-Mean Lifetime
作者:
arXiv:2606.11511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a critical multitype Bellman–Harris branching particle system in $\mathbb R^N$ with a finite type space $\mathbb K=\{1,\dots,K\}$. Particles of type $i$ move according to a symmetric $\alpha_i$-stable process and reproduce according to a critical offspring law whose mean matrix is irreducible and stochastic. The lifetime distribution of type $1$ is assumed to have infinite mean with regularly varying tail $$ 1-F_1(t)\sim c_1t^{-\gamma},\, 0 \frac{\gamma}{\beta}, $$ and a local increment condition on the heavy lifetime distribution, we prove convergence of the system to a Poisson random measure concentrated on the infinite-mean type.
20.
arXiv (CS.LG)
2026-06-16
GRASP: Gradient-Aligned Sequential Parameter Transfer for Memory-Efficient Multi-Source Learning
作者:
arXiv:2606.14900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-source transfer learning faces a fundamental scalability bottleneck: existing approaches require either loading all K source models into memory simultaneously during parameter fusion, requiring O(K) memory, or deploying all models at inference time, making production deployment infeasible. We propose GRASP (Gradient-Aligned Sequential Parameter Transfer), which achieves superior knowledge integration while maintaining O(1) memory consumption through three key innovations: (1) sequential processing that merges one source at a time into an evolving target model, (2) parameter-wise gradient alignment that selectively transfers only parameters whose optimization directions align with the target domain, avoiding negative transfer, and (3) iterative fine-tuning that adapts transferred knowledge before integrating the next source. Extensive experiments across three continual learning benchmarks (Yearbook, CLEAR-10, CLEAR-100) spanning 10 to 108-year temporal distribution shifts and four architectures (1.3M to 25.6M parameters) demonstrate that GRASP achieves 93.5% mean accuracy over all datasets and architectures compared to ensemble method's 71.7% accuracy while requiring only constant memory versus K models for standard multi-source fusion. Critically, GRASP's sequential previously merged models and scales to arbitrarily many sources without memory growth, making it uniquely suitable for resource-constrained deployment and continually evolving source domains.
21.
arXiv (CS.AI)
2026-06-16
Prototyping an AI-powered Tool for Energy Efficiency in New Zealand Homes
作者:
arXiv:2509.05364v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Residential buildings contribute significantly to energy use, health outcomes, and carbon emissions. In New Zealand, housing quality has historically been poor, with inadequate insulation and inefficient heating contributing to widespread energy hardship. Recent reforms, including the Warmer Kiwi Homes program, Healthy Homes Standards, and H1 Building Code upgrades, have delivered health and comfort improvements, yet challenges persist. Many retrofits remain partial, data on household performance are limited, and decision-making support for homeowners is fragmented. This study presents the design and evaluation of an AI-powered decision-support tool for residential energy efficiency in New Zealand. The prototype, developed using Python and Streamlit, integrates data ingestion, anomaly detection, baseline modeling, and scenario simulation (e.g., LED retrofits, insulation upgrades) into a modular dashboard. Fifteen domain experts, including building scientists, consultants, and policy practitioners, tested the tool through semi-structured interviews. Results show strong usability (M = 4.3), high value of scenario outputs (M = 4.5), and positive perceptions of its potential to complement subsidy programs and regulatory frameworks. The tool demonstrates how AI can translate national policies into personalized, household-level guidance, bridging the gap between funding, standards, and practical decision-making. Its significance lies in offering a replicable framework for reducing energy hardship, improving health outcomes, and supporting climate goals. Future development should focus on carbon metrics, tariff modeling, integration with national datasets, and longitudinal trials to assess real-world adoption.
22.
arXiv (CS.LG)
2026-06-15
Neural Slack Variables for Shape Constraints
作者:
arXiv:2606.13803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enforcing functional inequality constraints such as monotonicity and convexity in neural networks is a fundamental challenge in many industrial and scientific applications. Classical one-sided penalty methods, along with primal-dual methods gated by complementary slackness, provide constraint gradients only at violated locations, resulting in fragile satisfaction. Architectures that guarantee feasibility by construction, on the other hand, remain largely limited to elementary cases and impose additional inductive biases. We introduce neural slack variables, a deep learning native primal-side approach that converts constraint enforcement into a regression problem by coupling the primary network with a jointly learned auxiliary network. The auxiliary network serves as a valid target for the primary network's constraint quantities, inducing feasibility and regularity. Neural slack variables achieve zero measured violations on dense-grid monotonicity and convexity test cases, where penalty and primal-dual baselines leave residual violations, and enable arbitrage-free learning of volatility surfaces, an open industrial challenge in quantitative finance.
23.
arXiv (CS.LG)
2026-06-15
A Longitudinal Attribute-Conditioned Neural Network for Modeling Health-State Transition Probabilities in Temporally Irregular Data: The LANTERN Framework
作者:
arXiv:2606.13880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate estimation of long-term care transition probabilities is central to disability insurance pricing, reserving, and solvency assessment. Classical actuarial multi-state models commonly rely on Markov, semi-Markov, or proportional-hazard specifications, which provide a direct connection to cohort projection but may be restrictive for irregular longitudinal health data with nonlinear aging patterns and heterogeneous covariate histories. This paper develops a well-calibrated estimator of multi-state transition probabilities for irregular longitudinal health data. The model learns from individual health history, incorporates the time elapsed between observations, and conditions transition probabilities on demographic and socioeconomic attributes. It produces a valid probability distribution over the next observed health state, with four possible states: healthy, mild disability, severe disability, and death. Individual probabilities are aggregated by age group and origin state to form transition matrices compatible with actuarial cohort projection. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study, we compare the proposed estimator with logistic regression, gradient-boosted trees, a recurrent neural network, and a last-state persistence benchmark. The evaluation considers probabilistic accuracy, endpoint discrimination and calibration for severe disability and death, risk concentration, and transition matrix error after aggregation. The proposed estimator improves severe disability discrimination relative to logistic regression and gradient-boosted tree benchmarks, maintains strong calibration, and yields the lowest transition matrix error among the evaluated models in the held-out test analysis. Results show that a structured machine learning estimator can support long-term care transition modeling when judged by calibration and projection fidelity, beyond discrimination.
24.
arXiv (CS.AI)
2026-06-12
Benchmarking AI Agents for Addressing Scientific Challenges Across Scales
作者:
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arXiv:2606.12736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly being developed to accelerate scientific discovery, yet their practical capabilities in real research settings remain poorly understood. Existing benchmarks for AI agents rarely capture the complexity, heterogeneity, and extended reasoning required by scientific work, whereas benchmarks for scientific tasks often reduce research to static, direct problems and provide limited support for interactive evaluation. Here, we introduce SciAgentArena, a systematic benchmark for evaluating AI agents in real-world scientific research scenarios drawn from emerging needs across multiple domains. SciAgentArena comprises approximately 200 tasks with stepwise verification and an interactive, agent-agnostic environment for assessing diverse AI agents. Using this benchmark, we find that current agents can contribute effectively to well-specified data-analysis workflows, particularly when the task structure and evaluation criteria are clear. However, their performance remains uneven across scientific contexts: agents struggle to generate genuinely novel insights, sustain self-directed exploration, and formulate robust solutions for open-ended research questions. We further characterize common failure modes across agents and identify opportunities for improving their reliability, autonomy, and scientific reasoning. Together, SciAgentArena provides a practical framework for measuring progress in AI agents for science and for guiding the design of future agents capable of addressing complex scientific challenges. Full codes, tasks, and datasets can be accessed via this link: https://sciagentarena.github.io/.
25.
arXiv (CS.CL)
2026-06-12
Two Wrongs, No Right: Auditing Social-Desirability Bias in LLM Annotators for Computational Social Science
作者:
LLM annotators are increasingly used in computational social science (CSS), but it is unclear whether their alignment-shaped errors preserve the empirical conclusions a researcher would report. We audit three open-source 7B instruction-tuned models (Zephyr, Mistral-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Instruct) across six TweetEval tasks under four prompt conditions (72 cells) and find that social-desirability failures do not run in a single direction. Zephyr exhibits leniency bias, systematically under-applying harmful labels (offensive language: false benign rate 0.729, false alarm rate 0.031). Mistral and Qwen exhibit overcorrection, over-applying the same labels (Mistral hate-speech FAR = 0.604). All three models exhibit neutrality bias on abortion stance, underestimating opposition prevalence by 24 to 40 percentage points and inflating the neutral label. None of the four prompting interventions we test (neutral, safety framing, depersonalized, chain-of-thought) corrects these failures across models; safety framing can worsen stance distortion. Strikingly, Zephyr's hate-speech prevalence estimate matches the gold rate exactly while its class-conditional errors are large in both directions, an accidental cancellation that misleads aggregate validation. We translate these patterns into a three-part taxonomy with diagnostic FBR/FAR signatures and a lightweight gold-sample validation protocol. The headline for trustworthy CSS: a model that looks calibrated on aggregate metrics can still flip the substantive empirical conclusion a researcher would report.