Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

PaAno+: Multiscale Encoding and Cross-Variable Attention for Time Series Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.20055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series anomaly detection has significant practical value for industrial and medical monitoring, as well as other critical domains. Current Transformer- and large-model-based detection approaches incur excessive computational overhead, while existing lightweight alternatives are constrained by insufficient feature extraction and inadequate modeling of dependencies across multivariate variables. To mitigate the above drawbacks, this study develops a lightweight, efficient anomaly detection model, dubbed PaAno, within the patch-oriented representation learning paradigm. In the encoder module, a multiscale feature-extraction backbone is constructed using convolutional kernels with differentiated receptive fields to capture hierarchical temporal characteristics; subsequent cross-scale adaptive attention aggregation, combined with residual connection optimization, further stabilizes feature representation learning. A cross-variable fusion attention module is embedded to explicitly characterize inter-variable correlations, empowering the model to identify anomalous patterns amid intricate operational conditions. Moreover, a novel pretext task based on temporal patch-window sorting is customized to uncover intrinsic structural properties of time series, and triplet loss is leveraged to optimize the patch embedding space for enhanced feature discrimination. Extensive experiments on the TSB-AD benchmark demonstrate that the proposed PaAno achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on both univariate and multivariate tasks, yielding significant performance gains across evaluation metrics, including VUS-PR, relative to the original PaAno. Leveraging a compact network design, the presented model achieves favorable computational efficiency, enabling deployment on resource-limited terminals for real-time anomaly inference.

02.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-09

Adjuvanted inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus vaccine in healthy adults: a phase 1 trial

Lassa fever causes substantial morbidity and mortality in West Africa, and no licensed vaccine is available. We evaluated LASSARAB, an inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus (Josiah strain) glycoprotein complex vaccine. We conducted a randomized, controlled, dose-escalation phase 1 trial. Participants (total n = 54) received two intramuscular doses of LASSARAB containing 700 (n = 15), 1,400 (n = 15) or 2,800 (n = 14) relative units of antigen formulated with the TLR-4 agonist 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE adjuvant, or licensed rabies vaccine control (n = 10), administered 28 days apart. This protocol-defined interim analysis reports the primary safety evaluation and secondary immunogenicity assessments through day 61. There were no prespecified hypotheses or formal power calculations. All primary safety end points demonstrated an acceptable safety profile. After dose 1, local solicited adverse events occurred in 86.7–100.0% of LASSARAB groups and 80% of controls; systemic events in 33.3–71.4% and 60.0% of controls. After dose 2, local solicited adverse events occurred in 66.7–86.7% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls; systemic events in 53.3–71.4% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls. Events were predominantly mild and self-limited. Unsolicited adverse events occurred in 28.6–60.0% of LASSARAB groups and 20.0% of controls. No serious adverse event, immune-mediated condition or sensorineural hearing loss occurred. Safety laboratory abnormalities occurred in 13.3–66.7% of LASSARAB groups and 30.0% of controls (14 mild, 6 moderate and none severe). After two doses, Lassa virus GPC IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) was achieved in 100.0% (44 of 44) of LASSARAB recipients and 0.0% (0 of 10) of controls. Rabies glycoprotein IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) and neutralizing antibody by rapid fluorescent focus inhibition test (RFFIT) seroprotection (≥0.5 IU ml−1) were also 100% across all groups, including controls. LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl phosphorylated hexaacyl disaccharide (PHAD)-SE demonstrated a favorable safety profile and immunogenicity against Lassa and rabies viruses. The per-protocol final study report will include safety and durability through day 394. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT06546709 . An interim report of a first-in-human phase 1 trial found an adjuvanted, combination inactivated rabies-vectored, Lassa fever vaccine (LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE) to be safe and induced immunogenicity to both Lassa and rabies viruses in healthy participants.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Unveiling the Awareness of Private Health Insurance Coverage among Healthcare Professionals in Freetown, Sierra Leone: Insights Extracted from Their Perspectives.

Our study is an assessment of the knowledge, personal coverage, and related determinants of private health insurance as revealed by healthcare professionals in Freetown, the urban capital of Sierra Leone. This study stands as a precursor for Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), like Sierra Leone, seeking to establish Universal Health Coverage (UHC) to provide healthcare access and coverage through publicly arranged risk pooling, designed to help protect against unmanageable medical costs. In parallel, such countries face significant challenges with achieving sustainable universal coverage due to limited public resources, inefficient allocation systems, uneasy reliance on out-of-pocket payments, and large struggling populations. Our research sheds particular light on how healthcare professionals view their own participation with private healthcare options. A cross-sectional, analytical study was conducted, openly recruiting individuals from various facilities in Freetown. Using the Yamane Formula, a sample size of 109 participants was calculated. STATA 14.0 was used for data analysis. Our findings revealed that 96 (88.9%) participants did not have private health insurance, while 12 (11.1%) did have private coverage. However, 105 (97.2%) reported other modes of health insurance, with only 3 (2.8%) uninsured. Notably, 97.2% expressed willingness to join a private health insurance scheme. Our study found no statistically significant associations between selected indicators (demographic or socioeconomic fac tors) and current insurance coverage among study participants. These results highlight a low prevalence and understanding of private health insurance among healthcare professionals in a representative urban center in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), while acknowledging high willingness to enroll. The lack of any significant determinants suggests other unexamined factors, such as cost, accessibility, or awareness, capable of influencing the adoption and implementation of a universal health program.

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

Geometry-Preserving in 3D Gaussian Splatting for LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration

Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is essential for robust multi-modal perception. Targetless approaches avoid manual setup but remain limited by the scarcity of discriminative cross-modal features. Recent methods address this by reconstructing the scene within a differentiable model, enabling extrinsic optimization through dense photometric supervision. Among these, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely adopted as a geometric proxy that bridges LiDAR and camera within a single differentiable framework. However, since 3DGS was originally designed for novel view synthesis, existing methods tend to prioritize rendering quality, causing the proxy geometry to drift from the true LiDAR structure. We propose a framework that preserves the metric geometry of the Gaussian proxy by aggregating multi-view LiDAR observations for dense depth supervision and blocking photometric gradients from updating the Gaussian spatial parameters. We validate our method on public driving datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing targetless methods in calibration accuracy.

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

Distilling Examples into Task Instructions: Enhanced In-Context Learning for Real-World B2B Conversations

In-context learning (ICL) is the standard method for low-resource classification, yet its efficacy in specialized domains remains largely unexplored. We address the challenge of classifying semantically complex, multi-party B2B conversations, where traditional ICL encounters significant limitations, especially as context length increases due to the concatenation of multiple few-shot examples. We introduce the \texttt{Call Playbook} dataset, featuring five classification tasks derived from real-world B2B conversations targeting core sales concepts. To bridge the gap between performance and practical utility, we propose novel knowledge extraction methods that distill verbose examples into compact, interpretable representations of structured classification criteria and precise task descriptions. Our approach achieves a 99\% reduction in token usage and improves macro-averaged AUC by up to 7\% over traditional ICL. Notably, it remains robust as context grows, unlike advanced token compression baselines which degrade by over 9 F1 points. Importantly, our framework enables direct refinement of classification logic, addressing critical needs for transparency, efficiency, and user interaction in real-world NLP applications.

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

BRITE: A Benchmark for Reliable and Interpretable T2V Evaluation on Implausible Scenarios

The rapid advancement of photorealistic Text-to-Video (T2V) generation brings in an urgent need for up-to-date evaluation methods. Existing benchmarks largely overlooked implausible scenarios and do not measure audio-visual alignment. We introduce BRITE, the first framework that unifies (1) implausible prompting, (2) fine-grained assessment of audio-visual consistency, and (3) QA-based interpretable evaluation into a comprehensive T2V benchmark. Unlike fully automated Multimodal LLM-based pipelines, which are prone to hallucination and prompt ambiguity, BRITE guarantees reliability through a rigorous human-in-the-loop protocol for benchmark creation. Evaluating five state-of-the-art models (Sora 2, Veo 3.1, Runway Gen4.5, Pixverse V5.5, and Qwen3Max), we reveal a critical performance gap: while models excel at static object composition, they exhibit significant degradation in object-action binding and audio-visual synchronization. Our framework offers the community a reliable, interpretable benchmark and evaluation framework that can detect and locate limitations in the next generation of T2V models, especially for off-manifold prompts

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

Controlled Dynamics Attractor Transformer

arXiv:2606.15207v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer architectures have dramatically advanced representation learning and inference in deep models through self-attention mechanisms. In parallel,associative memory (AM) frameworks map representations onto energy landscapes, offering interpretable retrieval mechanisms. However, their continuous-time inference dynamics lack the biological plausibility of classical Continuous Attractor Neural Networks (CANNs). To bridge this gap, we propose Controlled Dynamics Attractor Transformer (CDAT), which couples a mixture von Mises-Fisher (Mo-vMF) attention energy with a Hopfield refinement energy, while augmenting energy descent with a CANN-inspired excitation-inhibition modulation. CDAT instantiates a topology-constrained dynamical system whose couplings encode relational structure among tokens, thereby linking attractor-style dynamics to modern energy-based attention. We further provide a constructive dissipation analysis to formally establish their controlled inference dynamics. Benefiting from these robust and structured dynamics, CDAT achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks in graph anomaly detection and graph classification.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Topical Phase Transitions in Artificial Intelligence Research: Large-Scale Evidence and an Early-Warning Signature for Emerging Topics

arXiv:2606.12828v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Do research topics in artificial intelligence grow gradually, or do they advance through abrupt, detectable jumps? Analyzing 80,814 accepted main-track papers from five premier AI conferences (ACL, CVPR, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS) spanning 2017 to 2025, we show major AI topics advance through topical phase transitions: remaining marginal for years, then surging across venues within one to three years. Large language models became the dominant cross-venue topic by 2025, diffusion models rose with comparable abruptness, and language-model methods crossed into computer vision via vision-language models, whereas reinforcement learning compounded smoothly, distinguishing genuine phase transitions from ordinary growth. This structure is our primary contribution: a large-scale, cross-venue characterization of how AI research reorganizes. We then ask whether a transition leaves a detectable footprint before it peaks. We define an early-warning signature, four publication-dynamics criteria frozen on 2017-2021 data, and evaluate it out of sample on 2023-2025 transitions, obtaining a precision of 27% and recall of 63% against a 13.5% base rate. Applied to 2025 data, the signature flags reasoning and test-time compute, agentic AI, multimodal LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, and world models as topics to monitor over 2026-2028. The source code is also publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/ai-phase-transitions.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Biopsychosocial determinants of HPV vaccine perception in university students of both sexes in Cucuta, Colombia, 2024: a cross-sectional study

Colombia has been internationally recognised as a paradigmatic case of vaccine confidence crisis since the 2014 Carmen de Bolivar event, and national HPV vaccination coverage remains far below the World Health Organization 2030 target. Most published evidence focuses on female adolescents and on cervical cancer; the perception of the HPV vaccine in university-age populations of both sexes–and across the broader spectrum of HPV-attributable disease–remains comparatively understudied. We aimed to describe the influence of biopsychosocial determinants on HPV vaccine perception among university students of both sexes in Cucuta, Norte de Santander, Colombia. We conducted a cross-sectional study with a mixed quantitative-qualitative approach in 2024 among four universities (Universidad de Santander, Universidad Francisco de Paula Santander, Universidad de Pamplona and Universidad Libre; combined enrolment 21,033 students). Using convenience sampling stratified by institution, 750 actively enrolled undergraduate students of both sexes (18-60 years) completed a structured online questionnaire adapted from previously validated instruments. The instrument captured sociodemographic information, HPV knowledge and HPV vaccine perception. Data were analysed using Students t-test, one-way analysis of variance, Tukey post-hoc tests, effect sizes and 95% confidence intervals, with a 0.05 significance threshold. Of 750 respondents, 54.2% were women, 61.3% were under 20 years of age, and 75.1% attended public universities. HPV knowledge was high in 39.2%, intermediate in 42.4% and low in 18.4%; women and students aged 26 years or older displayed higher knowledge. Although 91.2% had heard of HPV and 82.5% knew that both sexes could acquire it, recognition of clinical manifestations and complications was uneven: cervical cancer 51.7%, penile cancer 30.5%, vaginal warts 45.9% and warts in the penis, larynx, anus or rectum 34.0%. Vaccine-specific knowledge was low in 77.1%, with men disproportionately represented (85.9% versus 69.5% in women). Overall positive perception of HPV vaccination was 66.6%, slightly higher in women (68.8%) than men (63.9%), in students aged 26 years or older (70.1%) and in students from private universities (68.1% versus 65.9%). Inferential analysis identified sex (Cohens d = -0.357), type of university (d = 0.189) and HPV knowledge (partial eta-squared = 0.096) as the only significant determinants. Age, socioeconomic stratum, age at sexual debut and vaccine-specific knowledge did not reach meaningful significance. HPV vaccine perception was predominantly positive but conditioned by three biopsychosocial determinants, with HPV knowledge as the primary driver. The persistent gender gap reflects historical anchoring of HPV messaging in cervical disease and female-targeted campaigns. Public-health strategies should adopt comprehensive, gender-inclusive educational interventions that explicitly visibilise non-cervical HPV-related cancers and address both sexes from a common evidence base.

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

A PubMed-Scale Dataset of Structured Biomedical Abstracts

Structured abstracts are important for biomedical literature processing, by facilitating information retrieval, text mining, and knowledge synthesis. However, a vast portion of abstracts indexed in PubMed remain unstructured, presenting a significant bottleneck for downstream text-processing workflows and applications. To resolve this limitation, we introduce Structured PubMed, a comprehensive corpus of section-labeled biomedical abstracts compiled from the complete PubMed database, encompassing over 23.2 million research-article records. The corpus is divided into two distinct subsets: a collection of 5.9 million author-structured abstracts parsed from official XML files, and an automatically labeled collection of 17.2 million originally unstructured abstracts structured via a verbatim-extraction Large Language Model pipeline. Every record is harmonized under a unified five-section schema and mapped to its original PubMed identifier, publication type, and publication date. This dataset can be utilized to train sentence-classification models, benchmark text-segmentation architectures, and perform large-scale, section-specific information extraction at an unprecedented PubMed-wide scale.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

When Does Trajectory-Level Supervision Permit Efficient Offline Reinforcement Learning?

arXiv:2606.18531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning is typically analyzed under process-level reward supervision, yet many sequential decision datasets record only trajectory-level outcomes. We develop a statistical theory for offline policy optimization from such outcome-level supervision. We first study the canonical setting where the target remains the expected cumulative reward, but each offline trajectory provides only a scalar label whose conditional mean is the cumulative return. We propose OPAC, a pessimistic actor-critic algorithm that learns a latent reward model and optimizes a policy from trajectory-level labels. We prove a high-probability guarantee of order $\widetilde O(H^2\sqrt{C_{sa}(\pi^\star)/n})$ and a matching lower bound, characterizing the sharp statistical cost of replacing process-level rewards with one trajectory-level label. We then extend the principle to preference-based feedback, preserving the leading horizon and concentrability dependence up to preference-model constants. Finally, we study generalized outcome-based offline RL, where both the supervision and the objective are trajectory-level quantities induced by a nonlinear aggregation of latent per-step rewards. This problem is not learnable in general: for all-success objectives, any offline learner may require $\Omega(2^H)$ trajectories even with deterministic transitions and constant concentrability. We then identify a tractable regime through two structural coefficients, $\kappa_\mu(\sigma)$ and $\chi_\mu(\sigma)$, capturing information loss in outcome aggregation and generalized Bellman updates, under which generalized OPAC achieves polynomial sample complexity. Together, our results delineate when outcome-level supervision enables sample-efficient offline control and when missing process-level rewards create fundamental statistical barriers.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Physics-Informed Discovery of Yield Functions in Plasticity via Convex Neural Representations

arXiv:2606.19375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying anisotropic yield functions remains challenging since yielding is not directly observed in full-field mechanical measurements, directional calibration can require many loading directions, and selecting an appropriate analytical form is nontrivial. This study proposes a physics-informed framework for discovering yield functions from full-field displacement data and reaction force data, without stress observations, plastic strain measurements, direct yield surface data, or a prescribed parametric yield function. The framework identifies the yield function as a mechanically constrained constitutive component inside elastoplastic stress integration, rather than through direct stress-space supervision. The yield function is represented by a convex neural network that enforces convexity and positive homogeneity of degree one while imposing the assumed tension-compression symmetry, and this neural yield function is trained with a differentiable stress update and a physics-informed force equilibrium loss across multiple loading cases. The proposed framework is validated using finite element (FE) benchmark studies with von Mises, Hill 1948, and Yld2000-2d yield functions, assessing yield contour agreement, displacement-noise sensitivity, identifiability through plastically active stress states, epistemic uncertainty, and polynomial-surrogate deployment. This study provides a mechanics-constrained pathway for discovering anisotropic yield functions from displacement and force data while keeping the identified component within the structure of elastoplastic stress integration.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Sharp log-Sobolev inequalities on finite cyclic groups

arXiv:2606.02847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Let $\mathbb Z_n$ be the cyclic group equipped with the uniform probability measure $\pi$, and let $A_{\psi_n}$ be the Laplacian with word length \[ \psi_n(k) = \min(k,n-k). \] We prove the sharp log-Sobolev inequality \[ Ent_{\pi}(f^2) \le 2\pi(f A_{\psi_n} f), \qquad f:\mathbb Z_n \to [0,\infty), \] for every $n \ge 4$. The proof is inspired by the recent work of Frank and Ivanisvili[FrankIvanisvili2026] on a sharp log-Sobolev inequality for nearest-neighbor simple random walk. We use their cubic-majorant reduction, which turns the problem into a 3rd moment estimate; the new point is a blockwise 3rd moment estimate adapted to the word-length multiplier. The same 3rd moment argument also recovers the log-Sobolev inequality for Poisson-semigroup on the circle, first proved by Weissler[Weissler1980]. The same sharp inequalities were also obtained recently by Yao[Yao2026] by a different method.

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

ActiveSAM: Image-Conditional Class Pruning for Fast and Accurate Open-Vocabulary Segmentation

Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) provides a strong frozen backbone for concept-prompted segmentation, but applying it directly to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) is inefficient: full-resolution decoding is typically run over the entire dataset vocabulary, whereas each image contains only a small active subset of classes. We introduce ActiveSAM, a training-free, zero-shot inference framework that turns SAM 3 into an active-vocabulary segmenter. ActiveSAM first canonicalizes and expands class prompts, then estimates an image-conditioned active set from a low-resolution presence preview. Only the retained classes are decoded at full resolution, using bucketed prompt multiplexing with the frozen SAM 3 decoder. The preview stage uses only class-presence evidence and skips unnecessary segmentation-head computation, while the final stage applies margin-aware background calibration to suppress low-confidence pixels. ActiveSAM requires no target-dataset training, no weight updates, and no oracle class-presence labels. Across eight OVSS benchmarks, ActiveSAM improves the speed-accuracy tradeoff of training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, outperforming the current state-of-the-art SegEarth-OV3 by approximately +1.4 mIoU on average while running up to 5.5x faster on large-vocabulary datasets. ActiveSAM also demonstrates the strongest robustness under image corruption that simulates real-world distribution shift, making it well-suited for deployment in noisy-input domains such as autonomous driving and embodied AI. Code is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/ActiveSAM.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

M\"OVE: A Holistic LLM Benchmark for the German Public Sector

We present M\"OVE (Modelle für die \"Offentliche Verwaltung Evaluieren), a holistic benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in the context of the German public sector. While LLMs are increasingly adopted in public administration, model selection remains largely ad hoc, and existing benchmarks offer limited guidance: they are predominantly English-centric, US-centric in content, and focus exclusively on task performance. M\"OVE addresses these gaps by evaluating 39 models across two complementary dimensions. Performance criteria cover summarization, question answering, and topic extraction. Governance criteria assess hallucination tendencies, energy consumption, provider transparency, and alignment with German constitutional values and knowledge about positions by German political parties. In total, we utilize ten German-language datasets, including gold- and silverstandard datasets that we constructed to reflect public-administration domains. We employ a multi-metric evaluation strategy combining classical NLP metrics, embedding-based methods, and LLM-as-a-judge approaches. Our results show that no single model dominates across all criteria: top performers differ between tasks, and model size alone is a poor predictor of quality. We further evaluate the benchmark itself, analyzing its statistical precision, LLM judge reliability, the impact of our private datasets on model rankings, the sensitivity of our results to prompt formulation, and the validity of our energy consumption estimates. M\"OVE is designed as a living benchmark under active development; results are publicly available at https://moeve.bundesdruckerei.de/.

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

A Variational Framework for LLM Generator-Regulator Games

作者:

arXiv:2606.18424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a variational framework for regulated language generation. Starting from autoregressive token sampling, we derive the induced distribution over complete messages and relate it to an entropy-regularized Gibbs law. Regulation is modeled as an optimal discriminator whose convex-dual value is an f-divergence, and the generator-regulator interaction is formulated as a saddle-point problem. The framework applies to moderation, censorship, AI deception detection, compliance auditing, phishing defense, and manipulation control, where regulation concerns a distribution over possible messages rather than a single output. The equilibrium clarifies the tradeoff among utility, entropy, regulatory alignment, and finite-length detectability. Two finite-vocabulary case studies, censorship filtering and phishing defense, illustrate how the theory can be evaluated through utility, entropy, divergence, receiver-side scores, and detection probability.

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

Phase-Localized Curation Does Not Help: A Negative Result on Per-Phase Metric Selection for Demonstration Filtering

作者:

arXiv:2606.15064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manipulation demonstrations have temporal phase structure, and a natural hypothesis is that demonstration-curation metrics should be applied within phases rather than globally. The idea is to segment each trajectory into phases, score each phase with the metric that is locally most informative, and then aggregate. This follows directly from prior work showing that a single global metric can be the best detector of a defect and yet the worst curator of the resulting policy. We test the per-phase hypothesis on three contact-rich LIBERO pick-and-place tasks with a controlled early-release structural defect, comparing phase-gated curation against the same metrics applied uniformly and against a strong single global metric. Across all three tasks and five random seeds per condition, phase-gated curation is never the best curation strategy, and it is the worst of the three on two of the three tasks (Task 1: 86.0 vs. 92.0 for global; Task 3: 22.7 vs. 48.0 for uniform). We trace the failure to a concrete mechanism. When the defect signal is concentrated in a single phase, rank-aggregating across phases dilutes that signal with uninformative scores from defect-free phases, selecting a worse demonstration subset than simply applying the defect-informative metric everywhere. We further show that the per-phase metric selection does not transfer across tasks, since no phase shares a winning metric between any two tasks, so the selection cannot be reused and must be re-derived per task from a noisy sweep. These results bound a plausible and previously untested method, and they argue that practitioners should prefer identifying a single defect-informative metric over decomposing curation by phase. We release the full pipeline, all metric implementations, and per-seed results.

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

FlowRL: A Taxonomy and Modular Framework for Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion Policies

arXiv:2603.27450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Thanks to their remarkable flexibility, diffusion models and flow models have emerged as promising candidates for policy representation. However, efficient reinforcement learning (RL) upon these policies remains a challenge due to the lack of explicit log-probabilities for vanilla policy gradient estimators. While numerous attempts have been proposed to address this, the field lacks a unified perspective to reconcile these seemingly disparate methods, thus hampering ongoing development. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing a comprehensive taxonomy for RL algorithms with diffusion/flow policies. To support reproducibility and agile prototyping, we introduce a modular, JAX-based open-source codebase that leverages JIT-compilation for high-throughput training. Finally, we provide systematic and standardized benchmarks across Gym-Locomotion, DeepMind Control Suite, and IsaacLab, offering a rigorous side-by-side comparison of diffusion-based methods and guidance for practitioners to choose proper algorithms based on the application. Our work establishes a clear foundation for understanding and algorithm design, a high-efficiency toolkit for future research in the field, and an algorithmic guideline for practitioners in generative models and robotics. Our code is available at https://github.com/typoverflow/flow-rl.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Seasonality, source type, and women's water labor: A longitudinal mixed-methods study in Kenya and Honduras

Women shoulder the majority of water collection labor globally, yet how their water collection and water-related work experiences may change over time or by water source type remains insufficiently understood. We conducted a longitudinal, mixed-methods study in rural Kenya and Honduras to understand how women's experiences collecting water and performing water-related work varied between (a) two time points, (b) improved and unimproved water source types, and (c) water source location. Data were collected in 2023 and 2024 using interviews, observation, GPS-enabled watches, and scales to measure time and distance traveled, water weight and volume carried, and calories expended. 133 women participated in data collection (66 Kenya, 67 Honduras). We compared women's experience data by time point (2023 vs. 2024), source type (improved vs. unimproved), and source location (off-premises vs. on-premises) (t-test, Mann-Whitney U test). We also mapped participants' routes and activities to show which sources were visited, when, and for what activities. In Kenya, mean water collection time, distance, and caloric expenditure were significantly lower and water volume was significantly higher in 2024 when there were unexpected rains compared to 2023 when there was a persistent drought. When comparing source types during the 2023 drought, journeys to improved sources took significantly less time and energy and covered less distance than journeys to unimproved sources. These differences were not observed during the rainy conditions of 2024 when unimproved sources were closer and more accessible. In Honduras, water collection and water work burdens did not differ significantly by time point or source type. We found women with on-premises water access to still expend considerable time and caloric expenditure engaging in water work within their household compounds. Findings from Kenya suggest that water infrastructure improvements can reduce women's water collection burdens, though benefits may depend on and vary by season and source location. Findings from Honduras show that water labor does not end once water is in the household. Rather, substantial time and energy are expended carrying out water-related work even when sources are on premises, suggesting that efforts to assess water labor need to extend beyond collection alone. To meaningfully reduce burdens and ensure improved water sources are utilized during all seasons, initiatives need to consider source location, seasonal variability, and work beyond collection. Evaluations to assess infrastructure impacts on women's labor and well-being are needed and long overdue.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CalTennis: Large Multi-View Tennis Video Dataset and Benchmark of Monocular-to-3D Pose Estimation

The Caltech Tennis Dataset (CalTennis) is a large-scale video benchmark for evaluating monocular-to-3D pose estimation in the wild. CalTennis comprises over 11 million frames (51 hours) of tennis practice and match play from 40 players, captured with 2-6 synchronized cameras at 60 Hz. It is 10 times larger than existing in-the-wild human motion video datasets and 3 times larger than existing MOCAP-ground-truthed datasets, and it is the first large-scale benchmark to provide synchronized multi-view recordings of expert athletic motion. The multi-view setup enables inexpensive, label-free evaluation of monocular-to-3D pose estimation algorithms. We describe a simple, standardized protocol that enables data collection without specialized equipment or expertise, along with fully automated video calibration and synchronization. Benchmarking state-of-the-art monocular-to-3D pose methods on CalTennis, we find that while 3D joint angle recovery is now quite accurate, all models struggle to estimate depth and foot contact consistently. We further propose two novel performance metrics, footwork and stability, as well as qualitatively study body shape inconsistency. These metrics expose previously underexplored failure modes and point to concrete opportunities for improvement in pose estimation and action analysis.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

3D-CBM: A Framework for Concept-Based Interpretability in Generative 3D Modeling

This research introduces a framework for incorporating Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) into 3D generative architectures to address the inherent 'semantic gap' in deep geometric learning. As deep models become central to 3D content creation, explainability shifts from a peripheral feature to a fundamental requirement for trust and accountability in safety-critical domains such as healthcare and manufacturing. CBMs provide an intrinsic interpretability solution by constraining latent representations to align with human-defined concepts, yet their application to unstructured 3D data remains largely unexplored. We design, implement, and validate a formal 3D-CBM architecture that maps raw geometric inputs, including point clouds and meshes, into a multi-tiered taxonomy of interpretable primitives and functional attributes. The framework further identifies strategic datasets, such as PartNet and ShapeNet, specialized for concept-based supervision. Experimental results from a 3D part-manipulation proof-of-concept experiment demonstrate the framework's efficacy, achieving a concept prediction accuracy of 88.8\% and a Chamfer Distance of 0.0115. Critically, the model enables precise test-time intervention, allowing for the interactive correction of structural errors. This work establishes a foundation for semantically-steerable 3D generation and invites further exploration into collaborative human-in-the-loop design systems.

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

From Prompts to Tokens: Internalizing Causal Supervision in Vision-Language Model for Multi-Image Causal Reasoning

Visual causal reasoning is essential for understanding and intervening in the physical world, requiring identification of causal variables from visual inputs and reasoning over intervention effects. Despite recent progress, large vision–language models (VLMs) remain brittle at such tasks, especially for interventional and counterfactual queries over multi-image inputs. Most existing explorations inject causal knowledge via textual prompts, leaving causal mechanisms external to model execution and limiting reliable control during inference. To address this problem, we propose BridgeVLM, which internalizes visual causal reasoning by inducing a causal graph from multi-image inputs and converting it into structured Causal Tokens executed by RAMP layers injected into the LLM decoder for causal message passing. We further introduce a unified training interface M3S for fine-grained causal supervision from different granularities (local/global level). BridgeVLM achieves 54.4% accuracy on intervention tasks on CausalVLBench (vs. 33.2% with prompt-level supervision), improves results on Causal3D from 43.6% to 49.0%, and substantially improves causal structure learning on CausalVLBench ($F_1$: 33.4% $\rightarrow$ 75.1%).

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Computationally tractable robust differentially private mean estimation

作者:

arXiv:2606.12654v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a new, differentially private mean estimator called the balloon mean. The main features of the balloon mean are that it is computationally tractable and enjoys robustness to outlying observations. It is based on an iterative clipping procedure over expanding Mahalanobis balls, or ``balloons.'' The method satisfies zero-concentrated differential privacy and depends on a small number of interpretable tuning parameters. We provide theoretical guarantees under heavy-tailed and contaminated elliptical models, characterizing its statistical performance and robustness to outliers. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the balloon mean is robust to heavy-tailed and contaminated data, and outperforms existing differentially private mean estimators in contaminated settings.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Iterative Visual Thinking: Teaching Vision-Language Models Spatial Self-Correction through Visual Feedback

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong singleshot spatial grounding, yet lack any mechanism to observe and correct their own predictions. We find that naively prompting a VLM to iterate over rendered visualizations of its predictions causes catastrophic failure: Acc@0.5 on referring expression comprehension collapses from 79.6% to 48.7% (a 31 percentage point drop), revealing a fundamental gap between grounding capability and self-correction ability. We propose Iterative Visual Thinking (IVT), a closed-loop framework in which the model predicts a bounding box, observes the prediction rendered on the image, and iteratively refines through visual feedback. A two-phase training recipe closes the self-correction gap: first, we exploit the base model's own predictions as realistic errors and prompt a teacher VLM to generate corrective reasoning traces, yielding supervised data without human annotation; second, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a simple IoU reward to stabilize multi-step refinement. On a mixed benchmark spanning RefCOCOg, Ref-Adv, and Ref-L4 (505 test samples), SFT warm-up with IVT surpasses the single-shot base model on every metric: Acc@0.5 rises to 82.0% (+2.4pp), Acc@0.7 to 74.1% (+3.2pp), and Acc@0.9 to 48.3% (+2.8pp). GRPO further reduces per-step IoU degradation by 5x, stabilizing the refinement trajectory. All training uses only 2,400 samples on a single GPU, demonstrating that spatial self-correction is a learnable capability that can be instilled at modest scale.

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

An Explainable AI Assistant for Introductory Programming Education: Improving Feedback Reliability with Instructor-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2606.12425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Active learning is widely recognized as an effective approach for improving learning outcomes in introductory programming courses. However, insufficient instructional support often limits students' access to timely, personalized feedback, which is crucial for mastering foundational programming concepts. Although recent advances in AI, particularly large language models, offer scalable opportunities for feedback, concerns about explainability and reliability remain. In this paper, we present an AI-driven classroom assistant that leverages an explainable AI model to analyze student code, map logical errors to instructor-identified misconceptions, and deliver instructor-authored feedback, thereby grounding reliability in instructor-defined pedagogical knowledge. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we conducted an expert evaluation to examine its alignment with instructor-verified feedback and deployed the system in a classroom setting to assess students' perceptions of its usability. Results indicate that the assistant can provide accurate, instructor-verified feedback to students while fostering a positive experience.