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 (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Asymmetric quantum steering harvested near a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole

arXiv:2606.12766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the harvesting of quantum steering and its directional asymmetry between two Unruh-DeWitt detectors in a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole spacetime. Since the detectors are located at different radial positions outside the black hole, they experience inequivalent local environments induced by gravitational redshift, causing Alice to undergo stronger effective thermal noise than Bob. Remarkably, we uncover a counterintuitive phenomenon in which the detector subjected to a higher effective temperature exhibits stronger steerability than the other one, revealing a nontrivial inversion of thermal intuition in curved spacetime. Furthermore, quantum steering survives only within a finite window of detector energy gaps and reaches its maximum within an optimal regime. We find that Lorentz violation suppresses steering most strongly near this optimal energy gap, indicating an enhanced sensitivity of maximal correlation extraction to symmetry breaking effects. Our results demonstrate that Lorentz violation acts as a geometric constraint on the quantum information capacity of spacetime, simultaneously restricting both the strength and the directionality of quantum correlations.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Towards the implementation of a quantum classifier

arXiv:2606.10150v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we investigate the use of a quantum circuit as a binary classification model in the context of quantum machine learning. We call this model, binary quantum classifier. First, we describe fundamental concepts of quantum computing and introduce the computational tool used: Qibo, an open-source framework for efficient quantum simulations and quantum hardware control. Then, we describe how to design a binary quantum classifier for the classification of images and small arrays of variables by showing how to input data in the circuit, defining a quantum circuit model Ansatz with trainable parameters and a loss function, and implementing multiple minimizers. We test our quantum classifier with two data sets. The first one is the MNIST data set which is composed of handwritten digits (reduced to only handwritten zeros and handwritten ones for binary classification). We study the behavior of different minimizers by increasing the number of layers of the Ansatz. The second data set represents two different high energy collisions that can occur at colliders such as LHC (CERN). Due to in-time proton-proton interactions known as pile-up, we distinguish two different data sets: "without pile-up" and "with pile-up". These collisions can be represented by images of size 32x32 or by six high-level variables that we call features. By increasing the size of the training data set and the number of layers of the Ansatz, we search for the best minimizer. Splitting the data set in training set and test set, we compute: ROC curve, AUC score, confusion matrices and test set accuracy. For "with pile-up" images, we compare the results obtained with the quantum classifier with a small convolutional neural network. We conclude that is possible to build a binary quantum classifier with a quantum circuit and we highlight its performances and limitations in comparison with classical technologies.

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

Neural Tree Reconstruction for the Open Forest Observatory

The Open Forest Observatory (OFO) is a collaboration across universities and other partners to make low-cost forest mapping accessible to ecologists, land managers, and the general public. The OFO is building both a database of geospatial forest data as well as open-source methods and tools for forest mapping by uncrewed aerial vehicle. Such data are useful for a variety of climate applications including prioritizing reforestation efforts, informing wildfire hazard reduction, and monitoring carbon sequestration. In the current iteration of the OFO's forest map database, 3D tree maps are created using classical structure-from-motion techniques. This approach is prone to artifacts, lacks detail, and has particular difficulty on the forest floor where the input data (overhead imagery) has limited visibility. These reconstruction errors can potentially propagate to the downstream scientific tasks (e.g. a wildfire simulation.) Advances in 3D reconstruction, including methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), produce higher quality results that are more robust to sparse views and support data-driven priors. We explore ways to incorporate NeRFs into the OFO dataset, outline future work to support even more state-of-the-art 3D vision models, and describe the importance of high-quality 3D reconstructions for forestry applications.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Beyond Scalar Rewards by Internalizing Reasoning into Score Distributions

Reward models are central to text-to-image post-training, but visual preference is subjective and better represented as a distribution over rubric scores than as a deterministic scalar. Existing scalar, score-token, and pairwise reward models over-compress uncertainty and fine-grained score differences, while reasoning-based generative rewards provide stronger judgments but are costly to deploy and difficult to use as direct optimization signals. We propose Z-Reward, a teacher-student reward modeling framework that decouples reasoning-heavy judgment from efficient reward deployment. The teacher is a large VLM that uses reasoning to infer rubric-aligned score distributions, and is trained with Group-wise Direct Score Optimization (GDSO), which combines policy-gradient rewards from distribution expectations with direct pointwise and pairwise supervision on score distributions and score gaps. The student is trained with Reasoning-Internalized Score Distillation (RISD), which transfers the teacher's reasoning-conditioned score distribution into a compact VLM without requiring explicit reasoning chains at inference time. On our internally annotated evaluation set, the 27B GDSO teacher reaches 89.6% human preference accuracy, outperforming SFT, RewardDance, and GRPO, while the 9B RISD student reaches 88.6%, outperforming the OPD baseline and closely matching the larger teacher. We further show that Z-Reward can serve as a differentiable reward signal for text-to-image optimization, yielding a 41.3% net human-preference improvement over the SFT baseline.

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

Reinforcement Learning-Guided Retrieval with Soft Fusion for Robust Multimodal Imitation Learning under Missing Modalities

arXiv:2606.15514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems perceive the world through multiple input modalities – including visual camera streams and natural language instructions – and must select appropriate actions based on these signals. However, assuming the permanent availability of all input devices is unrealistic, as sensors may fail, become occluded, or drop out entirely during deployment. Robust handling of such missing-modality scenarios is therefore essential for real-world robot operation. This paper introduces RL4IL, a reinforcement learning guided method for imitation learning that selects the most suitable action for a given observation by identifying the most relevant expert demonstrations from a training library. A reinforcement learning policy, trained via Proximal Policy Optimisation over Breadth-First Search candidate sets, ranks candidate demonstrations and a soft cross-attention fusion head aggregates their action signals to produce the final prediction. When a modality is missing at inference time, a dedicated per-modality RL retrieval policy identifies donor demonstrations from the training library, and a soft imputation head reconstructs the missing embedding via cross-attention over the top-ranked donors – without requiring any retraining of the system. Experiments on three LIBERO benchmark suites demonstrate that RL4IL substantially outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning methods under sensor dropout conditions, while requiring no policy network training. The code can be found at https://github.com/h-ismkhan/Reinforcement-Learning-via-kNN-for-Robotic-Learning-with-Missing-Camera

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

Cascade Classification of Dermoscopic Images of Skin Neoplasms with Controllable Sensitivity and External Clinical Validation

Purpose. To compare deep learning architectures and classification schemes for dermoscopic images of skin neoplasms and assess their generalization on transfer from open international datasets to independent clinical datasets of Russian practice. Methods. Four architectures (ViT-B/16, Swin-S, ConvNeXt-S, EfficientNetV2-S) were compared in three schemes: binary (malignant/benign), single-stage four-class (benign, MEL, SCC, BCC), and a two-stage cascade (binary triage, then three-class differentiation MEL/SCC/BCC). All models used ImageNet-pretrained weights and a single augmentation protocol on aggregated open ISIC Archive data, and were evaluated on an internal held-out sample and two clinical datasets (Melanoscope AI mobile system; Sechenov University). Results. Internally the binary stage attains ROC-AUC 0.952-0.966; on Sechenov University it drops to 0.797-0.893, sensitivity to 0.53-0.67, and ECE rises from 0.02 to 0.27-0.39 with underestimation of malignancy, quantifying a generalization gap in ranking and calibration. Paired tests confirm one inter-architecture result on clinical data: the deficit of ViT-B/16 at the binary stage (p

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

From Parasocial Scripts to Dyadic Persistence in Autonomous AI-Agent Communities

While parasocial interactions (PSIs) and parasocial relationships (PSRs) have been studied in conventional media settings, we investigate whether PSI- (colloquial) relational cues also exist in online communities where both sides are autonomous AI agents. We analyze 4,434 posts and 50,338 comments from Moltbook through three theory-based textual indicators: attachment/intimacy language, reciprocity bids, and self-identification to original poster (OP). The combined results across methods based on keyword matching, few-shot large language model (LLM) annotation, and grouped-context LLM annotation reveal that PSI colloquial cues prevail and are strongly associated with OP re-engagement and a reciprocal reply structure. These results are robust across negative controls, nullification, clustered-standard-error re-estimation, and multiple-testing correction. A dyadic persistence test further affirms reciprocity bids aligned with sustained OP-involving mutual recurrence, providing empirical evidence for bridging interaction-level PSI scripts with PSR-consistent repeated dyadic patterns. We interpret the evidence as a behavioral structure in discourse by LLM-enabled agents.

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

Runtime Enforcement of Hybrid System Properties

arXiv:2606.12022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Runtime enforcement has emerged as a promising approach for ensuring the safety of autonomous and cyber-physical systems operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. Unlike traditional runtime verification, runtime enforcement actively intervenes during execution to prevent property violations by modifying unsafe system behaviors. Existing enforcement frameworks primarily focus on untimed or discrete-time specifications and are often limited to delaying or suppressing events, making them inadequate for reactive systems exhibiting complex continuous dynamics. In this paper, we propose a runtime enforcement framework where safety requirements are modeled using Hybrid Automata (HA). The framework combines discrete-event editing with continuous-time monitoring to support enforcement actions such as suppression, delay, and insertion of events at arbitrary time instants. Upon observing environmental inputs, the automaton is initialized, and runtime reachability analysis is used to synthesize safe corrective actions. We formally define the enforcement problem for safety hybrid automata, establish enforceability conditions, and present an online enforcement algorithm for reactive systems. A detailed case study on an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach in maintaining safety properties under unsafe controller behaviors. Experimental results show that the framework introduces minimal computational overhead while ensuring continuous compliance with safety requirements in real time.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Discrete Autoregressive Transformer for Generative Mechanism Synthesis

arXiv:2606.17409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Planar path synthesis requires mechanisms whose coupler curves match a prescribed trajectory; the mapping from curve to linkage is inherently one-to-many across four-, six-, and eight-bar topologies. We address this design problem with simulation-grounded evaluation on a curated corpus of over one million mechanisms, reporting Chamfer distance and dynamic time warping after forward kinematics and geometric alignment. We formulate synthesis as conditional autoregressive sequence modeling: joint coordinates are uniformly quantized to tokens and generated by a decoder-only transformer with a variational-autoencoder (VAE) latent of the target curve and an explicit mechanism-type token. Training combines token cross-entropy with a Gaussian-smoothed bin auxiliary loss that respects ordinal structure among bins. At inference, a bounded latent-noise schedule decodes all mechanism types at each noise level; we retain the top five candidates by geometric error, yielding diverse accurate families without dataset lookup. On held-out tests, aggregate mean Chamfer distance is $0.0132$ and mean dynamic time warping is $0.153$; a latent $k$-nearest-neighbor baseline that conditions on training-set neighbor latents in VAE space achieves matched-topology mean Chamfer distance $0.0071$ and mean dynamic time warping $0.117$ using the same decoder.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Estimating Tail Risks in Language Model Output Distributions

arXiv:2604.22167v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language models are increasingly capable and are being rapidly deployed on a population-level scale. As a result, the safety of these models is increasingly high-stakes. Fortunately, advances in alignment have significantly reduced the likelihood of harmful model outputs. However, when models are queried billions of times in a day, even rare worst-case behaviors will occur. Current safety evaluations focus on capturing the distribution of inputs that yield harmful outputs. These evaluations disregard the probabilistic nature of models and their tail output behavior. To measure this tail risk, we propose a method to efficiently estimate the probability of harmful outputs for any input query. Instead of naive brute-force sampling from the target model, where harmful outputs could be rare, we operationalize importance sampling by creating unsafe versions of the target model. These unsafe versions enable sample-efficient estimation by making harmful outputs more probable. On benchmarks measuring misuse and misalignment, these estimates match brute-force Monte Carlo estimates using 10-20x fewer samples. For example, we can estimate probability of harmful outputs on the order of 10^-4 with just 500 samples. Additionally, we find that these harmfulness estimates can reveal the sensitivity of models to perturbations in model input and predict deployment risks. Our work demonstrates that accurate rare-event estimation is both critical and feasible for safety evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/rangell/LMTailRisk

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Diagnostic Concordance of Immediate Versus 1-Hour Technetium-99m Hydroxydiphosphonate Scintigraphy in Suspected Transthyretin Amyloid Cardiomyopathy

Background Bone-avid tracer myocardial scintigraphy for the diagnosis of transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM) has traditionally employed imaging at one or 3-hour intervals. Technetium-99m hydroxydiphosphonate (99mTc-HDP) has unique characteristics that may enable earlier imaging. We investigated the diagnostic concordance of immediate versus 1-hour acquisitions. Methods Consecutive patients with suspected ATTR-CM underwent planar imaging and SPECT/CT immediately and at 1-hour following the administration of 99mTc-HDP. Perugini grades and heart to contralateral lung (H/CL) ratios were assessed. Target-to-background ratios (TBRs) were calculated on the SPECT/CT acquisitions using the left ventricular (LV) septum and three background regions: aorta, LV blood-pool, and vertebrae. We assessed diagnostic concordance using Cohen's Kappa ({kappa}), temporal stability using paired t-tests, and correlation between timepoints using Pearson's coefficient (r). The 1-hour SPECT/CT interpretation served as the protocol reference standard. Results Forty-eight patients (83% male; median age, 80 [73-85] years) were evaluated. One-hour SPECT/CT identified 19 positive and 29 negative cases. Immediate SPECT/CT demonstrated 100% diagnostic concordance with the 1-hour reference standard ({kappa} = 1.000; 95% CI: 1.00 to 1.00; p < 0.001). The LV septum/LV Blood-Pool TBR showed the highest correlation (r = 0.956; 95% CI: 0.922 to 0.975; p < 0.001). The LV Septum/Aorta TBR demonstrated high correlation (r = 0.918; 95% CI: 0.857 to 0.953; p < 0.001) and remained stable in the ATTR-negative cohort (-0.02; 95% CI: -0.08 to 0.04; p = 0.54). Significant decrease in the LV Septum/Vertebrae TBR in the ATTR-negative (-0.55; 95% CI: -0.64 to -0.47; p < 0.001) and ATTR-positive cohorts (-1.14; 95% CI: -1.39 to -0.89; p < 0.001) was observed. Conclusions Immediate 99mTc-HDP SPECT/CT is diagnostically concordant with standard 1-hour protocols. By leveraging SPECT/CT and the favorable kinetics of 99mTc-HDP, immediate-phase imaging can accurately reproduce 1-hour acquisitions in cases of suspected ATTR-CM. This expedited approach may improve nuclear laboratory throughput and patient satisfaction.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Frequency-dependent cognitive effects of Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) improves levodopa-induced motor complications and cardinal motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), but stimulation frequency may differentially shape outcomes. This is evident for axial and gait symptoms, which may respond differently to lower-frequency stimulation. Whether frequency-dependent effects extend to cognition remains unclear. Objective: To investigate the cognitive effects of DBS at distinct frequencies in PD. Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis (PROSPERO - CRD42024618253). PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE were searched for studies assessing cognitive outcomes under different stimulation frequencies. Eight cognitive domains were defined: verbal fluency, cognitive flexibility, executive control, working memory, attention, processing speed, episodic memory, and time processing. Multilevel random-effects meta-analyses were performed, with effect sizes expressed as Hedges' g. Results: Forty-three studies met the inclusion criteria, the majority (n = 31) involving STN-DBS. Twenty-one STN-DBS studies, including 355 patients, were included in the meta-analysis. Compared with HFS ([&ge;] 130 Hz), lower frequencies (4-80 Hz) were associated with better verbal fluency (g = 0.27) and cognitive flexibility (g = 0.38), with consistent effects across sensitivity and leave-one-out analyses. Accuracy-based executive control measures also favored lower-frequency stimulation. OFF-stimulation comparisons showed a concordant pattern. Evidence for other targets (PPN and NBM) was limited. Conclusions: Lower-frequency STN-DBS was associated with modest benefits in specific cognitive domains compared with HFS. These findings highlight the need for future research to determine how frequency interacts with stimulation location and symptom-specific networks to shape cognitive and cognitive-motor outcomes in PD.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

The Pragmatic Persona: Discovering LLM Persona through Bridging Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) reveal inherent and distinctive personas through dialogue. However, most existing persona discovery approaches rely on surface-level lexical or stylistic cues, treating dialogue as a flat sequence of tokens and failing to capture the deeper discourse-level structures that sustain persona consistency. To address this limitation, we propose a novel analytical framework that interprets LLM dialogue through bridging inference – implicit conceptual relations that connect utterances via shared world knowledge and discourse coherence. By modeling these relations as structured knowledge graphs, our approach captures latent semantic links that govern how LLMs organize meaning across turns, enabling persona discovery at the level of discourse coherence rather than surface realizations. Experimental results across multiple reasoning backbones and target LLMs, ranging from small-scale models to 80B-parameter systems, demonstrate that bridging-inference graphs yield significantly stronger semantic coherence and more stable persona identification than frequency or style-based baselines. These results show that persona traits are consistently encoded in the structural organization of discourse rather than isolated lexical patterns. This work presents a systematic framework for probing, extracting, and visualizing latent LLM personas through the lens of Cognitive Discourse Theory, bridging computational linguistics, cognitive semantics, and persona reasoning in large language models. Codes are available at https://github.com/JiSoo-Yang/Persona_Bridging.git

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Adaptive and Explicit safe: Triggering Latent Safety Awareness in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.16808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks, they remain highly vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreaks and direct harmful queries. To address this vulnerability, prior works depend heavily on external manual data annotation for safety alignment. However, we observe that LRMs can inherently identify safety risks when being re-presented with original queries alongside their own reasoning trajectories – a capability we term Latent Safety Awareness. To leverage this safety awareness, we first employ Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to explicitly induce safe tags to trigger safety analysis and guidance following the initial reasoning content for unsafe queries, while preserving standard responses for general queries to ensure adaptive triggering. Subsequently, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to further enhance the correctness and stability of the safety analysis and guidance. Notably, responses required for both training stages are entirely generated by models being optimized. With (Safe Trigger) SFT and DPO, experimental results demonstrate significant safety enhancement. For example, the Attack Success Rate (ASR) of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B, on average, drops 24.65% and 36.72% on harmful and jailbreak benchmarks, respectively. Finally, our Safe Trigger method exerts almost no negative impact on general performance or user experience.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Driving, Fast or Slow? Neuro-Symbolic Guidance for Motion Prediction in Multi-Modal Ground Mobility

arXiv:2606.15251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate and interpretable motion prediction for heterogeneous traffic spaces, including pedestrians, bicycles, cars, and trucks, is essential for safe autonomous navigation. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art approaches remain predominantly black-box, lacking explicit encoding of the regulatory and behavioral constraints of real-world mobility. We propose Trajectory Compliance-Shaping (TraCS), a neuro-symbolic framework that augments existing black-box motion prediction backbones with interpretable and probabilistic first-order logic. To do so, TraCS employs an agentic code-generation pipeline to bridge the gap between natural-language descriptions of traffic regulations and probabilistic motion prediction. Furthermore, TraCS employs a reactive data-streaming inference engine that maintains and efficiently updates compliance landscapes as scenes evolve. To prevent TraCS from overconfidently steering the backbone's predictions in the wrong direction, we propose a neural confidence rating learned as a context-aware attenuation of the compliance signal. We demonstrate on the Argoverse 2 benchmark how TraCS consistently improves state-of-the-art prediction backbones, showing that probabilistic and symbolic compliance reasoning is a broadly applicable and computationally efficient complement to purely neural motion predictors.

16.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Pathways of emergency care for severely ill children in Nigerian and Ugandan hospitals: A process mapping study

作者:

by Rami Subhi, Abiodun Sogbesan, Dan Muramuzi, Mikael Burhin, Ayobami A. Bakare, Adegoke G. Falade, Freddy E. Kitutu, Freddie Ssengooba, Carina King, Sumit Kane, Belinda Dawson-McClaren, Hamish R. Graham, the MOXY-Implementation Research Collaboration Background Child mortality remains high in countries with weak emergency care systems. Facility organisation for paediatric emergency care is heterogeneous and under-described. We examined how hospitals in Uganda and Nigeria are organised to deliver emergency care for neonates and children. Methods and findings We conducted a qualitative, multi-method study in 26 purposively selected secondary and tertiary facilities in Uganda and Nigeria from October 2023 to December 2024. Embedded researchers documented patient pathways, resources for care, and care processes for severely ill children (

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Prototyping an AI-powered Tool for Energy Efficiency in New Zealand Homes

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.

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

Exit-and-Join Dynamics for Decentralized Coalition Formation

作者:

arXiv:2606.19683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies coalition formation as a decentralized dynamical process driven by unilateral exit-and-join decisions. Agents evaluate local moves using the Aumann-Dreze value, so payoffs are computed within the agent's current coalition rather than through a globally negotiated coalition structure. The resulting model links cooperative payoff allocation with noncooperative best-response behavior: a terminal partition is precisely a coalition structure with no admissible, individually profitable exit-and-join deviation. We establish equilibrium characterizations, identify conditions under which the dynamics admit scalar Lyapunov or exact-potential representations, and analyze how switching and acceptance costs shape local stability. Numerical experiments test finite-time stabilization, cost sensitivity, and a special convex-game benchmark.

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

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

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

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

Machine learning enables roughness-driven inverse design of milling processes

arXiv:2606.16032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interest in applying data-driven approaches in manufacturing has grown significantly, particularly for mapping complex, high-dimensional relationships. The milling process is one area where predictive models can link influential parameters to surface roughness metrics prior to in situ operations. While this approach offers clear advantages, it faces challenges due to limited datasets and robustness issues in inverse design paradigms. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a machine learning (ML)-based framework for the inverse design of the surface milling process, with a focus on surface roughness as the design objective. The framework employs forward training of two ML models, a deep neural network (DNN) and a random forest (RF) ensemble, both developed using a high-fidelity synthetic dataset generated from a computational simulation framework. These trained models are integrated into a Bayesian optimization (BO) procedure to overcome the multiplicity problem arising from the many-to-one mapping inherent in the dataset. The approach identifies top-performing milling process configurations, considering both process and tool parameters, and presents them from the full solution space. The models achieve average relative errors below 5% when compared to reference results, thereby demonstrating the robustness and reliability of the proposed methodology.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Logarithmic Large Deviations for Heavy-Tailed Sums

arXiv:2606.16487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We establish logarithmic large-deviation bounds for sums of independent nonnegative random variables with regularly varying tails. The normalization is chosen at the extreme-value scale and the speed is $\log n$. In contrast with Cramér's theorem, the resulting rate function is determined only by the tail index. The proof transfers a maximum large-deviation principle to sums in the one-big-jump region.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Robust Privacy: Inference-Stage Privacy through Certified Robustness

arXiv:2601.17360v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adversary observing a model's released prediction can infer sensitive attributes of the queried input, or even reconstruct representatives of the model's training data. The inference interface thus acts as a side channel for privacy leakage. We introduce Robust Privacy (RP), an inference-stage privacy notion inspired by certified robustness: if a model's prediction is provably invariant within a radius-R neighborhood around an input x with confidence at least $1-\alpha$, then x enjoys $(R,\alpha)$-Robust Privacy, under which we prove that any adversary observing the released prediction has at most $\alpha/2$ advantage in distinguishing x from any input within distance R of x. Building on RP, we formalize Robust Attribute Privacy (RAP), an attribute-level privacy notion that characterizes the set of sensitive-attribute values that remain compatible with a released prediction. On a classification task, RP increases the median length of the RAP-compatible inference interval from 23.50 to 29.96, reducing attribute-inference precision. Model inversion attacks, often treated as a training-stage threat, in fact rely on fine-grained signals leaked through the inference interface; RP masks these signals at the inference stage, reducing attack success rate (ASR) from 73% to 4% on a black-box inversion attack. This direct targeting of the leakage channel enables RP to dominate DP-SGD and randomized response in the privacy-utility tradeoff space: RP retains 98.4% accuracy at 21% ASR, whereas DP-SGD must drop accuracy to 61.7% to reach a comparable ASR. Across both experiments, increasing the smoothing sample size N strengthens privacy and improves utility together. Finally, we examine model distillation as a scope boundary and show that RP mitigates attribute-level and instance-level inference-stage privacy leakage, but not function-level extraction through model distillation.

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

Quantum Machine Learning for Industrial Applications

arXiv:2606.14822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Machine Learning have transformed numerous industrial sectors, yet classical paradigms face fundamental limitations: rapidly growing data volumes, rising computational costs, significant energy consumption, and the physical scaling limits of conventional hardware architectures. Quantum computing has emerged as a promising computational paradigm to address these challenges, giving rise to the field of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). In this thesis, the theoretical foundations of QML are investigated, with a focus on near-term and future practical applications. Three central challenges are addressed: the trainability of variational quantum circuits, their expressivity, and their resistance to efficient classical simulation. The trainability of Hamming-weight preserving variational quantum circuits is first studied, and theoretical guarantees are established that resolve an open conjecture on the absence of barren plateaus for this circuit family. Subspace-preserving QML algorithms are then introduced, including photonic circuits and quantum convolutional neural networks, and are designed to mimic classical ML subroutines while offering polynomial quantum advantage. Finally, variational quantum circuits are analyzed as quantum Fourier models, and a framework is derived to jointly characterize expressivity and trainability, from which conditions are obtained under which quantum models provably separate from their classical counterparts. These contributions are intended to advance the theoretical roadmap for harnessing near-term and future quantum technologies in real-world applications.

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

A biological vision inspired framework for machine perception of abutting grating illusory contours

Higher levels of machine intelligence demand alignment with human perception and cognition. Deep neural networks (DNN) dominated machine intelligence have demonstrated exceptional performance across various real-world tasks. Nevertheless, recent evidence suggests that DNNs fail to perceive illusory contours like the abutting grating, a discrepancy that misaligns with human perception patterns. Departing from previous works, we propose a novel deep network called illusory contour perception network (ICPNet) inspired by the circuits of the visual cortex. In ICPNet, a multi-scale feature projection (MFP) module is designed to extract multi-scale representations. To boost the interaction between feedforward and feedback features, a feature interaction attention module (FIAM) is introduced. Moreover, drawing inspiration from the shape bias observed in human perception, an edge detection task conducted via the edge fusion module (EFM) injects shape constraints that guide the network to concentrate on the foreground. We assess our method on the existing AG-MNIST test set and the AG-Fashion-MNIST test sets constructed by this work. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that ICPNet is significantly more sensitive to abutting grating illusory contours than state-of-the-art models, with notable improvements in top-1 accuracy across various subsets. This work is expected to make a step towards human-level intelligence for DNN-based models.

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

A2SG:Adaptive and Asymmetric Surrogate Gradients for Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks

Training deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) remains challenging due to sharp loss landscapes and temporal inconsistency caused by surrogate gradients. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework: adaptive and asymmetric surrogate gradients A2SG. The adaptive gradients adjust an effective window for spatio-temporal adaptation, reducing spatial gradient variation and maintaining directional consistency of gradients over time. The asymmetric gradients reflect neuronal dynamics by assigning larger gradients to neurons with higher membrane potentials, and we prove that they yield lower variation than symmetric surrogates. Our analysis further establishes a direct connection between local gradient variation and the curvature of the loss landscape, providing a principled explanation for how A2SG promotes convergence to flatter minima and improves generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse models, including CNN-based and Transformer-based SNNs, across various tasks such as image classification using both static and neuromorphic datasets, as well as segmentation. The results demonstrate that A2SG consistently improves accuracy and energy efficiency, establishing it as a general and reliable solution for training deep SNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/KIST-NCL/A2SG.git.