Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

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

01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

An Improved Generative Adversarial Network for Micro-Resistivity Imaging Logging Restoration

An improved GAN-based imaging logging image restoration method is presented in this paper for solving the problem of partially missing micro-resistivity imaging logging images. The method uses FCN as the generative network infrastructure and adds a depth-separable convolutional residual block to learn and retain more effective pixel and semantic information; an Inception module is added to increase the multi-scale perceptual field of the network and reduce the number of parameters in the network; and a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block are added to combine the channel attention. The multi-scale module adds a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block, which combine the channel attention mechanism and the residual block to achieve multi-scale feature extraction. The global discriminative network and the local discriminative network are designed to gradually improve the content and semantic structure coherence between the restored parts and the whole image by playing off each other and the generative network. According to the experimental results, the average structural similarity measure of the five sets of imaged logging images with different sizes of missing regions in the test set is 0.903, which is an improvement of about 0.3 compared with other similar methods. It is shown that the method in this study can be used for the restoration of micro-resistivity imaging log images with good improvement in semantic structural coherence and texture details, thus providing a new deep learning method to ensure the smooth advancement of the subsequent interpretation of micro-resistivity imaging log images.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Dual Distribution Estimation for Zero-shot Noisy Test-Time Adaptation with VLMs

While test-time adaptation (TTA) empowers vision-language models to adapt without costly retraining, it remains highly vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) outliers prevalent in real-world applications. This discrepancy motivates Noisy TTA (NTTA), an online task to filter noisy OOD samples on the fly while maximizing in-distribution (ID) classification accuracy. Existing zero-shot NTTA approaches typically rely on test-time discriminative training, leading to overconfident misclassifications and significantly degraded inference efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework named Dual Distribution Estimation (DDE), shifting the zero-shot NTTA paradigm from instance-level learning to training-free Gaussian distribution modeling. DDE incorporates two novel modules: Positive Feature Distribution Estimation (PFDE) and Negative Label Distribution Estimation (NLDE). PFDE explicitly models class-wise inclusion and exclusion Gaussian distributions to formulate a calibrated contrastive score, robustly enhancing ID accuracy. In parallel, NLDE improves OOD identification by explicitly modeling the negative label distribution to mine highly discriminative labels, effectively mitigating spurious correlations. Extensive experiments show that on the large-scale ImageNet benchmark, DDE achieves an improvement of 3.70\% in harmonic mean accuracy and reduces the FPR95 for OOD detection by 6.20\%, while ensuring highly scalable and efficient online inference. Furthermore, DDE is zero-shot and training-free, demonstrating remarkable robustness in data-scarce scenarios. Codes are available at https://github.com/ZhuWenjie98/DDE.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

LoRA-Muon: Spectral Steepest Descent on the Low-Rank Manifold

arXiv:2606.12921v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) significantly reduces compute and memory costs for finetuning Deep Learning models but is often harder to tune than dense training: when using factor-wise optimizers such as AdamW, it is sensitive to initialization choices, its optimal learning rates transfer poorly across ranks, and it often fails to beat dense baselines. We derive LoRA-Muon by applying the Muon optimizer's spectral steepest-descent rule to the low-rank setting. Along with our split weight-decay rule, our main claim is that LoRA-Muon is a good low-rank proxy for full-rank Muon and Shampoo-family optimizers. Its optimal learning rates transfer across rank, width, depth, and factor-rescaling. In our compute-matched TinyShakespeare study, a rank-$2$ proxy recovers the dense best tested learning rate, and a rank-$32$ LoRA-Muon run attains lower mean validation loss than the dense baseline in the seed-averaged sweep. We further show that the Spectron optimizer depends on arbitrary factor scaling, so it would likely be a poor fit when finetuning starts from badly imbalanced factors, and that LoRA-RITE's simplified QR-coordinate core implements the same spectral update. LoRA-Muon computes that update without QR-decomposition and avoids storing second moments, making it more accelerator-friendly and memory-efficient.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

What Does ODRL Mean? A Cross-Level Ontological Grounding of Permissions, Prohibitions, and Duties in UFO-L

arXiv:2606.24344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ODRL policy evaluators produce verdicts, but say nothing about the normative positions a policy brings into existence, the authority structures those positions presuppose, or who holds the power to declare a norm violated. We formulate the Cross-Level Design Principle: any normative language with violable, consequential norms requires both conduct-level positions (Permission, Duty, Right, No right) and competence-level positions (Power, Subjection, Immunity, Disability). Applying this to ODRL, we establish that prohibition is sanctioned (violation possible and consequential), that permission is underspecified across its behaviour parameter (open vs. closed world), and that the formal semantics covers achievement obligations only. We ground ODRL in UFO-L, mapping each activated rule to a simple legal relator and extending coverage from two to eight legal positions; violation-declaration authority, implicit in every existing evaluator, becomes an explicit Power-Subjection pair. All axioms are mechanically verified in Isabelle/HOL and across a 39-problem benchmark under Vampire, E, and Z3.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

How Do Instructions Shape Speech? Cross-Attention Attribution for Style-Captioned Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.20532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Style-captioned text-to-speech systems use natural language to control voice characteristics, but how individual words influence acoustic output remains unclear. Understanding this is critical for diagnosing failure modes and improving controllability in expressive TTS. We propose cross-attention attribution for speech diffusion models, adapting the DAAM framework to the speech domain for the first time, and apply it to CapSpeech-TTS. Our method extracts per-token heatmaps across 25 layers and 24 ODE steps. We analyze 3,600 (style caption, text transcript) combinations comprising 120 style captions conditioning the generation of 30 text transcripts each, revealing how caption tokens shape waveforms. Results show: (1) style tokens have lower temporal variance than content/function tokens, confirming global conditioning; (2) style attention correlates with F0 and energy; (3) style conditioning peaks in early steps and deep layers; (4) attention entropy reaches its minimum at layer 17, co-occurring with the style importance peak, indicating maximal network selectivity at the most style-critical stage. This is the first study of how natural language influences cross-attention in speech diffusion models

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

Neglected Free Lunch from Post-training: Progress Advantage for LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.26080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Process reward models enable fine-grained, step-level evaluation of LLMs, yet building them for agentic settings remains prohibitively difficult: long-horizon interactions, irreversible actions, and stochastic environment feedback make both human annotation and Monte Carlo estimation infeasible at scale. In this work, we show that reinforcement learning (RL) post-training already provides the ingredients for effective step-level scoring, eliminating the need for dedicated reward model training altogether. Concretely, we derive an implicit advantage under a general stochastic Markov decision process, which we term progress advantage – log-probability ratio between the RL-trained policy and its reference policy exactly recovers the optimal advantage function. This formulation makes the resulting signal annotation-free, domain-agnostic, and available as a byproduct of the standard RL post-training pipeline. We validate the effectiveness of the progress advantage across three different applications: test-time scaling, uncertainty quantification, and failure attribution on five benchmarks and four model families. Across all settings, it consistently outperforms confidence-based baselines and, despite requiring no task-specific training, surpasses dedicated trained reward models. We complement these results with deeper analyses on characteristics of progress advantage, offering practical guidance for adoption in real-world agentic systems.

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

Sum-of-Squares Degree Barriers for the Reweighted-Hinge Method in Robust Halfspace Learning: A Christoffel-Function Characterization

作者:

arXiv:2606.17215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A certificate that removes outliers sees the data only through its low-degree moments, and an adversary exploits exactly this, hiding corruption where the clean data already looks typical, in the blind spot no bounded-degree test resolves. That blind spot turns out to have an exact size: the Christoffel function of the clean marginal, the very quantity modern data analysis thresholds to detect outliers, here read from the adversary's side as the corruption a bounded-degree certificate cannot remove. We turn this inversion into the organizing principle of the reweighted-hinge approach to robustly learning $\gamma$-margin halfspaces under malicious noise (Shen, 2025; Zeng and Shen, 2025): the governing resource is the Sum-of-Squares degree of the outlier-removal certificate, and the resolution principle states that the maximal corruption mass which can hide at a center $c$ from a degree-$2t$ certificate is exactly the Christoffel function $\lambda_{t+1}(c)$ of the clean marginal. Three consequences follow, all against the certificate method (not information-theoretic). A margin-degree tradeoff: certifying the dense pancake to error $\epsilon$ costs SoS degree $\Omega(\log(1/\epsilon))$ or margin $\Omega(\sqrt{\log(1/\epsilon)}/\sqrt{d})$, explaining why the $\log(1/\epsilon)$ margin Shen (2025) records is forced, with a weighted-Chebyshev reduction making the threshold $2t=\Theta((|c|/s)^2)$ tight modulo one classical weighted-extremal estimate. A degree-$2$ outlier barrier: the resolution principle realized as an explicit instance on which degree $2$ is stuck at $\eta^{1/2}$ while degree $4$ escapes, locating the method's small breakdown rate in the degree, not the analysis. And a degree-$2t$ algorithm tracing the frontier $\eta^{1-1/2t}$ (recovering Shen (2025) at $t=1$), whose gain is an explicit constant, capped by the pancake density and shown unimprovable by the degree-$2$ barrier.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

OCOO-T : A SIMPLE AND SCALABLE VIRTUAL CELL MODEL FOR TRANSCRIPTIONAL PERTURBATION RESPONSE PREDICTION

Predicting single-cell transcriptional responses to genetic, chemical and cytokine perturbations is a fundamental challenge in computational biology and AI Virtual Cell (AIVC) modeling, with direct implications for drug discovery and the elucidation of gene regulatory networks. Existing approaches often rely on auxiliary cell-state encoders, hierarchical variational autoencoders, dedicated Transformer encoder-decoder modules, or gene-interaction priors to compress high-dimensional expression profiles into latent representations. While effective, these designs increase architectural complexity and may limit scalability and generalizability. This paper introduces OCOO-T, a minimalist flow-matching-based AIVC model for transcriptional perturbation response prediction. OCOO-T utilizes a vanilla Transformer stack that operates directly on continuous gene expression profiles and formulates perturbation response prediction as a continuous-time denoising process. Perturbation embeddings, dosage information, and cell-line/cell-type specificity are integrated through adaptive layer normalization and in-context tokens. Comprehensive evaluations on Tahoe100M, Replogle, and PBMC benchmarks demonstrate that OCOO-T achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse perturbations and cell types while effectively scaling to long transcriptional profiles through patching and depatching of cellular contexts. By leveraging the simplicity of Transformer-based denoising for single-cell omics, OCOO-T provides an effective and scalable framework for in-silico cellular simulation.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

In situ nanocrystal confinement for efficient blue perovskite LEDs

Metal halide perovskites have emerged as promising semiconductors for light-emitting diodes (LEDs) owing to their excellent luminescence properties1. However, their performance remains limited, primarily owing to the inherent contradiction between ‘high crystallinity’ and ‘small size’ in the in situ synthesis of perovskite nanocrystals on substrates. Here we report efficient blue perovskite LEDs (PeLEDs) achieved via in situ polymerization-driven nanocrystal confinement to synthesize perovskite films composed of high-quality nanocrystals. The in situ-formed polymer network imposes nanoscale spatial constraints during perovskite nanocrystal growth, enabling nanocrystals with small sizes and a high photoluminescence quantum yield of 83%. Furthermore, polymerizable monomers with sufficient coordination sites allow a prolonged lattice rearrangement of perovskite clusters, promoting the crystallinity of the nanocrystals. The synthesized perovskite nanocrystals are utilized in the fabrication of PeLEDs, resulting in an external quantum efficiency of 21.8% at 491 nm, which is among the highest performances in blue PeLEDs. This work simultaneously controls the thermal dynamics of perovskite crystallization and organic ligand reactions, which helps to advance understanding of the effect of ligand engineering on nanocrystal synthesis, benefiting the development of efficient PeLEDs and other optoelectronic technologies. Efficient blue perovskite light-emitting diodes with an external quantum efficiency of 21.8% are achieved through in situ polymerization-driven nanocrystal confinement.

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

Physics-Distilled Neural Network enabled by Large Language Models for Manufacturing Process-Property Predictive Modeling

arXiv:2606.11605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting process-property relationships in manufacturing is often challenged by high experimental costs and the limited interpretability of complex 'black-box' models. This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation framework designed to achieve high-accuracy predictions in data-scarce scenarios. The framework integrates analytical physics priors, which are systematically extracted from scientific literature via Large Language Models, into a privileged teacher model. We employ a Graph-Masked Attention layer to capture the complex physical dependencies among input variables showing strict setpoints or a combination of static and high-frequency temporal signatures. This privileged knowledge is distilled into a lightweight student predictor for inference. The feasibility and robustness of the framework are evaluated through a comprehensive experiment across five diverse manufacturing processes. To ensure statistical reliability, given the small dataset sizes, a repeated K-fold cross-validation technique is employed to quantify model stability and generalization. Results indicate that the proposed framework consistently achieves high predictive accuracy across all evaluated domains. Most importantly, the architecture demonstrates significant fault tolerance by maintaining robust predictive performance even in scenarios where LLM-derived analytical priors are suboptimal or incomplete. Furthermore, the student predictor achieves an inference frequency exceeding 6000 Hz, which facilitates real-time edge deployment on standard industrial hardware. This work provides a scalable solution for bridging the gap between theoretical physics and real-time industrial monitoring in data-limited environments.

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

LLM-Based Synthetic Ground Truth Generation for Audio-Based Emotion Classification via In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606.14784v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding human states and interaction dynamics is a core goal of human-computer interaction (HCI). As interaction paradigms become more immersive, virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a powerful platform for studying collaborative work. In such settings, evaluating team collaboration states, including team performance and team resilience, requires continuous and reliable inference of latent team-level cognitive and affective states from multi-modal sensor data, such as speech signals. However, generating ground truth labels for these latent states remains challenging due to sensor-induced noise, contextual variability, and sparse expert annotations. Traditional self-reporting approaches provide only static and delayed measurements and are therefore insufficient for capturing dynamic team processes reflected in continuous speech data. In this work, we propose a large language model (LLM)-driven, agentic inference workflow for automated emotion-related synthetic ground truth generation from streaming speech data in multi-user VR environments. Leveraging the generalization capabilities of LLMs, we use In-Context Learning (ICL) with few-shot demonstrations of paired audio-based samples and their corresponding transcriptions. ICL tends to achieve task adaptation comparable to model fine-tuning while circumventing the computational overhead of parameter updates. To construct informative and robust in-context prompts, we adopt a retrieval-based selection strategy that dynamically identifies relevant audio demonstrations based on similarity in the acoustic feature space.

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

Bidirectional Tutoring for Developmental Motor Learning in Robots: Co-Developed Interaction Dynamics Support Stable Learning

arXiv:2606.19728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Infants are well known to develop their motor skills through dense interaction with caregivers. Although such social interaction is crucial for human development, motor-skill learning in robots is often treated as a unidirectional process in which robots passively receive demonstrations from tutors. This overlooks a key property of social interaction: it is inherently bidirectional, with tutor and learner dynamically adapting to each other. In such interactions, the robot's past experiences may function as prior constraints that shape the dynamics of their co-developed trajectories. We hypothesize that bidirectional tutoring allows such constraints to guide the formation of consistent behavioral patterns that preserve behavioral coherence and support generalization, whereas unidirectional interaction lacks such constraints and leads to broader, less consistent behavioral patterns. To examine this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments with a physical humanoid robot performing an object manipulation task: one involving human-robot interaction and another employing an AI tutor interacting with the real robot through an adaptive intervention mechanism designed to examine whether similar effects would emerge under more controlled conditions. We implement the developmental learning framework using a free-energy-principle-based neural network extended with generative replay, which supports stable sequence-by-sequence learning from single tutored episodes. Across both settings, bidirectional tutoring fostered consistent behaviors and stage-wise generalization, while the robot gradually required less tutor guidance. These results suggest that bidirectional tutoring, as an embodied and socially grounded approach, provides an effective scaffold for developmental motor learning in robots.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Contour Field based Elliptical Shape Prior for the Segment Anything Model

The elliptical shape prior information plays a vital role in improving the accuracy of image segmentation for specific tasks in medical and natural images. Existing deep learning-based segmentation methods, including the Segment Anything Model (SAM), often struggle to produce segmentation results with elliptical shapes efficiently. This paper proposes a new approach to integrate the prior of elliptical shapes into the deep learning-based SAM image segmentation techniques using variational methods. The proposed method establishes a parameterized elliptical contour field, which constrains the segmentation results to align with predefined elliptical contours. Utilizing the dual algorithm, the model seamlessly integrates image features with elliptical priors and spatial regularization priors, thereby greatly enhancing segmentation accuracy. By decomposing SAM into four mathematical sub-problems, we integrate the variational ellipse prior to design a new SAM network structure, ensuring that the segmentation output of SAM consists of elliptical regions. Experimental results on some specific image datasets demonstrate an improvement over the original SAM.

14.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Effects of SGLT2 inhibition on incident heart failure in carriers of cardiomyopathy-associated genetic variants

Although the beneficial effects of sodium–glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibition in heart failure (HF) have been well established, it is unknown whether SGLT2 inhibition confers benefit in carriers of rare variants in cardiomyopathy-associated genes. Here we evaluated whole-exome sequencing data from the randomized DECLARE-TIMI 58 trial, in which adults with type 2 diabetes and increased cardiovascular risk were randomized to dapagliflozin or placebo treatment. Pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants (P/LP) in high-confidence cardiomyopathy genes were identified, and treatment effects on hospitalization for HF (HHF) were compared between carriers of such variants and noncarriers. Among 12,685 patients for whom sequence data were obtained, 121 carried a cardiomyopathy variant (76 dilated cardiomyopathy, 25 hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and 25 arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy). Over a median follow-up of 4.2 years, dapagliflozin lowered the risk of HHF more strongly in carriers (hazard ratio 0.18, 95% confidence interval 0.04–0.86) than in noncarriers (hazard ratio 0.70, 95% confidence interval 0.57–0.86; P interaction 0.03). Absolute risk reduction was 13.0% in carriers and 1.0% in noncarriers (P interaction 0.03). Most carriers (82%) had no prior HF, and in carriers without prior HF, treatment with dapagliflozin reduced the absolute risk of HHF by 12.8%, compared with a reduction of 0.6% in noncarriers (P interaction 0.01). The findings from this cohort of older and high-risk patients raise the possibility that SGLT2 inhibitor treatment should be started early to prevent HF in individuals who carry P/LP cardiomyopathy variants. These results need to be confirmed in a prospective, dedicated trial of preventive HF treatments in carriers of P/LP cardiomyopathy-associated variants. In a whole-exome sequencing analysis, the beneficial effects of the SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin in reducing the risk of future heart failure hospitalization in individuals with type 2 diabetes were markedly greater in individuals who carried a cardiomyopathy-associated genetic variant compared with noncarriers, suggesting a personalized preventative therapy based on genetic information.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Entanglement preservation and Clauser-Horne nonlocality in electromagnetically induced transparency quantum memories

arXiv:2507.15453v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement preservation in noisy quantum memories represents a central challenge in quantum information science. While experiments have shown that electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) memories can store entangled photons, a quantitative theoretical analysis of whether nonlocal quantum correlations can survive storage loss induced by ground-state decoherence remains limited. Here we combine the dark-state polariton formalism with a reduced density-operator treatment to derive an EIT-specific effective pure-loss description for the retrieved photonic state in the ground-state-decoherence-limited regime. The analysis reveals that decoherence transforms an initially pure Bell state into a mixed state with a vacuum component and predicts a protocol-dependent storage-efficiency benchmark of 89.7% for violating the chosen unconditional Clauser-Horne (CH) inequality. Above this benchmark, the retrieved photonic state violates the CH inequality without post-selection, whereas below it, this unconditional CH violation is no longer obtained. This framework provides a quantitative theoretical description of entanglement retention, retrieved photonic density operators, and protocol-dependent Bell-test benchmarks in EIT quantum memories.

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

Unsupervised Learning of Efficient Exploration: Pre-training Adaptive Policies via Self-Imposed Goals

arXiv:2601.19810v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks. A promising direction, grounded in human development, investigates agents that learn by setting and pursuing their own goals. The core challenge lies in how to effectively generate, select, and learn from such goals. Our focus is on broad distributions of downstream tasks where solving every task zero-shot is infeasible. Such settings naturally arise when the target tasks lie outside of the pre-training distribution or when their identities are unknown to the agent. In this work, we (i) optimize for efficient multi-episode exploration and adaptation within a meta-learning framework, and (ii) guide the training curriculum with evolving estimates of the agent's post-adaptation performance. We present ULEE, an unsupervised meta-learning method that combines an in-context learner with an adversarial goal-generation strategy that maintains training at the frontier of the agent's capabilities. On XLand-MiniGrid benchmarks, ULEE pre-training yields improved exploration and adaptation abilities that generalize to novel objectives, environment dynamics, and map structures. The resulting policy attains improved zero-shot and few-shot performance, and provides a strong initialization for longer fine-tuning processes. It outperforms learning from scratch, DIAYN pre-training, and alternative curricula. Code is available at: https://github.com/Octavio-Pappalardo/ulee-jax

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

MedP-CLIP: Medical CLIP with Region-Aware Prompt Integration

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated outstanding performance in global image understanding and zero-shot transfer through large-scale text-image alignment. However, the core of medical image analysis often lies in the fine-grained understanding of specific anatomical structures or lesion regions. Therefore, precisely comprehending region-of-interest (RoI) information provided by medical professionals or perception models becomes crucial. To address this need, we propose MedP-CLIP, a region-aware medical vision-language model (VLM). MedP-CLIP innovatively integrates medical prior knowledge and designs a feature-level region prompt integration mechanism, enabling it to flexibly respond to various prompt forms (e.g., points, bounding boxes, masks) while maintaining global contextual awareness when focusing on local regions. We pre-train the model on a meticulously constructed large-scale dataset (containing over 6.4 million medical images and 97.3 million region-level annotations), equipping it with cross-disease and cross-modality fine-grained spatial semantic understanding capabilities. Experiments demonstrate that MedP-CLIP significantly outperforms baseline methods in various medical tasks, including zero-shot recognition, interactive segmentation, and empowering multimodal large language models. This model provides a scalable, plug-and-play visual backbone for medical AI, combining holistic image understanding with precise regional analysis.

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

Forced Deferral: Manipulating Routing Decisions in Multimodal LLM Cascades

arXiv:2606.15308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong visual reasoning abilities, serving a large model for every query is computationally expensive. MLLM cascades mitigate this cost by first querying a weak but cheaper model and deferring to a strong model when the weak model's output is unconfident. However, since the weak model's confidence directly controls compute allocation, these systems expose a new attack surface: an adversary can manipulate confidence so that their queries are consistently deferred to the strong model. Motivated by this vulnerability, we introduce the Forced Deferral Attack (FDA), an adversarial image attack that lowers the weak model's confidence and causes cascades to route queries to the strong model. FDA learns a universal border trigger by optimizing a temperature-flattened objective. This objective pushes the weak model's token distribution on triggered inputs toward less concentrated targets constructed from its clean responses. Across datasets, model families, and deferral metrics, FDA consistently increases strong-model routing while outperforming image-perturbation and prompt-injection baselines. These results show that MLLM cascades are vulnerable to attacks that manipulate compute allocation, forcing unintended strong-model usage without directly targeting answer correctness.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tungsten Germanide Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors with Saturated Internal Detection Efficiency at Wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m

arXiv:2511.20868v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) are among the most sensitive single-photon detectors available and have the potential to transform fields ranging from infrared astrophysics to molecular spectroscopy. However, extending their performance into the mid-infrared spectral region - crucial for applications such as exoplanet transit spectroscopy and vibrational fingerprinting of molecules - has remained a major challenge, primarily due to material limitations and scalability constraints. Here, we report on the development of SNSPDs based on tungsten germanide, a novel material system that combines high mid-infrared sensitivity with compatibility for large-scale fabrication. Our detectors exhibit saturated internal detection efficiency at wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m, while using 2.7x thicker films (8 nm vs 3 nm) and up to 4.5x wider nanowires (360 nm vs 80 nm) compared to mid-infrared-optimized SNSPDs fabricated from tungsten silicide. This advance will enable scalable, high-performance single-photon detection in a spectral region that was previously inaccessible, opening new frontiers in remote sensing, thermal imaging, environmental monitoring, molecular physics, and astronomy.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On the Singular Control of a Diffusion and its Running Infimum or Supremum

arXiv:2501.17577v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a class of singular stochastic control problems for a one-dimensional diffusion $X$ in which the performance criterion to be optimised depends explicitly on the running infimum $I$ (or supremum $S$) of the controlled process. We introduce two novel integral operators that are consistent with the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation for the resulting two-dimensional singular control problems. The first operator involves integrals where the integrator is the control process of the two-dimensional process $(X,I)$ or $(X,S)$; the second operator concerns integrals where the integrator is the running infimum or supremum process itself. Using these definitions, we prove a general verification theorem for problems involving two-dimensional state-dependent running costs, costs of controlling the process, costs of increasing the running infimum (or supremum) and exit times. Finally, we apply our results to explicitly solve an optimal dividend problem in which the manager's time-preferences depend on the company's historical worst performance.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Evaluating LLMs on Real-World Software Performance Optimization

Software performance optimization is a notoriously complex and manual task. Despite the growing use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code refinement, we still lack benchmarks that capture how optimization actually happens in real-world codebases. Existing frameworks often oversimplify the problem by focusing on isolated functions or a single performance metric, missing the critical trade-offs between execution time and memory footprint, the inherent noise of the measurement environment, and the variability introduced by different input data and execution conditions. We address this by introducing SWE-Pro, a repository-level benchmark derived from 102 expert-written optimizations from open-source projects. Unlike previous benchmarks, SWE-Pro pairs each task with parameterized tests to evaluate runtime, peak memory, and Time-Weighted Memory Usage (TWMU) across varying input data and execution conditions under noise-aware measurement conditions. Our evaluation shows that current LLMs struggle significantly: runtime gains are negligible, and memory optimizations are nearly non-existent. This stands in sharp contrast to expert implementations, which achieve an aggregate speedup of 15.5x and peak memory reduction of 171.3x over benchmark tasks. Expert-written improvements are observed in 91.2% of tasks for runtime and 65.7% for peak memory. Our findings expose a substantial gap between current LLM capabilities and the demands of expert-level engineering.

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

Beyond Uniform Token-Level Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.10968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become standard for improving LLM reasoning. However, existing PPO-style trust-region mechanisms remain position-agnostic by enforcing uniform thresholds across all tokens independently. This pointwise treatment conflicts with autoregressive generation in two critical ways. First, uniform thresholds ignore autoregressive asymmetry. Early-stage deviations produce compounding sequence-level drift, causing static thresholds to under-regulate early divergence and excessively constrain late-stage exploration. Second, evaluating token-level divergence in isolation overlooks cumulative prefix drift, granting the same divergence allowance regardless of how far the conditioning history has already deviated from the rollout policy. To address this limitation, we propose CPPO (Cumulative Prefix-divergence Policy Optimization), a token-level masking rule that aligns updates with a finite-horizon policy-improvement bound via two coupled mechanisms. First, a position-weighted threshold imposes stricter limits at early positions whose effects persist longer, relaxing constraints for late-stage tokens. Second, a cumulative prefix budget tracks historical deviations, dynamically restricting further token-level deviation to prevent compounding errors along the prefix. Empirically, CPPO enhances training stability and significantly improves reasoning accuracy across various model scales.

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

LLM Compression by Block Removal with Constrained Binary Optimization

In this paper, we formulate the compression of large language models (LLMs) by optimally deleting transformer blocks (``block removal'') as a constrained binary optimization (CBO) problem that can be mapped to a physical system (Ising glass), whose energies are a strong proxy for downstream model performance. This formulation enables an efficient ranking of a large number of candidate block-removal configurations yielding many high-quality, non-trivial solutions beyond those only removing consecutive regions. Our method performs strongly in the deep compression regime, such as for 50% compression of Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct, where we achieve an almost 23 percentage point increase on the MMLU benchmark compared to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) block-removal methods. For lighter compression, it performs on par with those methods across several benchmarks for Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Qwen3-14B (both before and after retraining), as well as Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. The approach is computationally efficient and requires only forward and backward passes on a calibration dataset for a few active parameters. Additionally, we demonstrate that using good heuristic solvers for the CBO problem provides solutions that perform well on downstream tasks in negligible runtime when it is unfeasible to solve the problem exactly. The method can be readily applied to any architecture. We illustrate this generality on the recent NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-FP8 model, which exhibits a highly inhomogeneous and challenging block structure, and where we outperform SOTA for AIME25 and GPQA when removing either 2 attention layers or 3 mixture-of-experts layers.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Free energy of non-convex multi-species spin glasses with centered Ising spins

arXiv:2606.16636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We identify the limit free energy of all multi-species spin glasses with centered $\pm 1$ spins. The result was previously known only under a convexity assumption on the covariance function of the Hamiltonian. We also obtain a one-species reduction of the formula for balanced multi-species models.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Entangled states are typically incomparable

arXiv:2406.03335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Consider a bipartite quantum system, where Alice and Bob jointly possess a pure state $|\psi\rangle$. Using local quantum operations on their respective subsystems, and unlimited classical communication, Alice and Bob may be able to transform $|\psi\rangle$ into another state $|\phi\rangle$. Famously, Nielsen's theorem [Phys. Rev. Lett., 1999] provides a necessary and sufficient algebraic criterion for such a transformation to be possible (namely, the local spectrum of $|\phi\rangle$ should majorise the local spectrum of $|\psi\rangle$). In the paper where Nielsen proved this theorem, he conjectured that in the limit of large dimensionality, for almost all pairs of states $|\psi\rangle, |\phi\rangle$ (according to the natural unitary invariant measure) such a transformation is not possible. That is to say, typical pairs of quantum states $|\psi\rangle, |\phi\rangle$ are entangled in fundamentally different ways, that cannot be converted to each other via local operations and classical communication. Via Nielsen's theorem, this conjecture can be equivalently stated as a conjecture about majorisation of spectra of random matrices from the so-called trace-normalised complex Wishart-Laguerre ensemble. Concretely, let $X$ and $Y$ be independent $n \times m$ random matrices whose entries are i.i.d. standard complex Gaussians; then Nielsen's conjecture says that the probability that the spectrum of $X X^\dagger / \operatorname{tr}(X X^\dagger)$ majorises the spectrum of $Y Y^\dagger / \operatorname{tr}(Y Y^\dagger)$ tends to zero as both $n$ and $m$ grow large. We prove this conjecture, and we also confirm some related predictions of Cunden, Facchi, Florio and Gramegna [J. Phys. A., 2020; Phys. Rev. A., 2021].