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.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Static Endpoints: Tool Programs as an Interface for Flexible Agentic Web Services

arXiv:2606.19992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the agentic web era, LLM-based agents increasingly invoke web services as tools, yet most interfaces remain static endpoints that poorly express long-horizon workflows with loops, conditionals, joins, and retries. We present ToolPro, which represents an agent's tool intent as an executable tool program that compactly encodes multi-step service interactions with explicit effect types. ToolPro combines constraint-guided program construction, effect-aware replay for exactly-once state-modifying calls, and a profile-driven policy that decides when program execution outperforms stepwise calling. We instantiate ToolPro over MCP-style services with WebAssembly sandboxing and evaluate it on diverse workflows of real-world applications. ToolPro reduces end-to-end latency by up to 53.4\% and client-side traffic by up to 96.1\%, with larger gains under higher network latency and workflow complexity.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Signals of Provenance: Practices & Challenges of Navigating Indicators in AI-Generated Media for Sighted and Blind Individuals

arXiv:2505.16057v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-Generated (AIG) content has become increasingly widespread by recent advances in generative models and the easy-to-use tools that have significantly lowered the technical barriers for producing highly realistic audio, images, and videos through simple natural language prompts. In response, platforms are adopting provable provenance with platforms recommending AIG to be self-disclosed and signaled to users. However, these indicators may be often missed, especially when they rely solely on visual cues and make them ineffective to users with different sensory abilities. To address the gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews (N=28) with 15 sighted and 13 BLV participants to examine their interaction with AIG content through self-disclosed AI indicators. Our findings reveal diverse mental models and practices, highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of content-based (e.g., title, description) and menu-aided (e.g., AI labels) indicators. While sighted participants leveraged visual and audio cues, BLV participants primarily relied on audio and existing assistive tools, limiting their ability to identify AIG. Across both groups, they frequently overlooked menu-aided indicators deployed by platforms and rather interacted with content-based indicators such as title and comments. We uncovered usability challenges stemming from inconsistent indicator placement, unclear metadata, and cognitive overload. These issues were especially critical for BLV individuals due to the insufficient accessibility of interface elements. We provide practical recommendations and design implications for future AIG indicators across several dimensions.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MuseVLA: An Adaptive Multimodal Sensing Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

Humans naturally leverage diverse sensing modalities to interact with the physical world, while most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotics rely solely on RGB observations. This limits their ability to perceive physical properties that are difficult or impossible to infer from RGB cameras, such as temperature, sound, or radar response. We present MuseVLA, an adaptive multimodal sensing VLA model that integrates novel sensors as on-demand tools for robotic manipulation. Given a task instruction and visual context, MuseVLA first generates a sensor token and target description that select the sensing modality to invoke and what to attend to, analogous to a tool call with arguments. It then converts the selected sensor measurement into a grounded sensor image, a unified intermediate representation that encodes heterogeneous readings for multimodal fusion and action generation. This design decouples sensor-specific processing from the VLA backbone, enabling efficient integration of diverse modalities. To reduce the need for expensive multisensory robot datasets, we further introduce a data synthesis pipeline that augments existing RGB video datasets with grounded sensor images, enabling generalization to unseen sensor-guided tasks. We evaluate MuseVLA on a real-world robot across challenging dexterous hand manipulation tasks that require multimodal sensing inputs, including temperature-guided pick-and-place, audio-driven object search, and radar-assisted hidden object retrieval. MuseVLA achieves 80.6% success rate on average, outperforming RGB-only and multisensory VLA baselines significantly, and exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on unseen tasks.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Seed variation impacts clustering stability in Single-Cell RNA-Seq and can be mitigated by StAbility-BasEd-Reassignment (SABER)

Single-cell RNA-seq clustering is commonly treated as reproducible once a random seed is fixed, yet the choice of seed itself may alter cell assignments and downstream interpretation. We systematically quantified seed-induced clustering variability by running Louvain and Leiden clustering across 100 seeds in Seurat and Scanpy on 28 single-cell RNA-seq datasets from the Human Cell Atlas and IMMUcan. Using Element-Centric Consistency, we found that seed choice affected a substantial fraction of cells, with Scanpy showing more unstable assignments than Seurat on average, 40.46% versus 26.78% unstable cells, respectively. This increased stability came at a marked computational cost: Seurat required approximately 19-fold higher median memory than Scanpy. Seed-dependent clustering variability also propagated to cell-type annotation, particularly among transcriptionally related populations including macrophage/monocyte, endothelial/epithelial and T/NK cell states. To mitigate this instability, we developed StAbility-BasEd Reassignment (SABER), a Scanpy-based framework that identifies seed-sensitive cells across repeated clusterings and reassigns them to stable cluster cores using cosine similarity. SABER improved clustering quality while preserving annotation concordance and reduced median memory usage 3.5-fold compared with Seurat-Louvain. Our results identify seed choice as an underappreciated source of variability in single-cell analysis and provide a scalable strategy to improve clustering robustness.

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

Adaptive Distance-Aware Trunk Deep Operator Learning for Long-Span Roadway Bridges

arXiv:2606.20015v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-span roadway bridges exhibit highly localized structural responses under vehicular loading, making repeated FE analysis computationally expensive for applications such as influence surface generation and structural digital twins. Existing SciML approaches struggle to accurately capture these localized responses. To address this challenge, this study proposes an adaptive-trunk DeepONet for localized structural response prediction in large-scale bridge systems. The framework dynamically constructs a load-dependent learning domain using a KNN strategy, allowing the network to focus on structural influence zones. The trunk network is further enhanced using distance-aware features that encode the geometric relationship between the load and structural nodes. A physics-based full-field reconstruction is incorporated through a stiffness-informed Schur complement formulation, enabling predictions at adaptive nodes to be extended to the entire structural domain. To enable scalable training, response data are generated using a reduced-order equivalent shell model that preserves the dominant global behavior while significantly reducing computational cost. The proposed framework is validated on both a benchmark bridge model and the real-world Mussafah Bridge. Results show that the method achieves FEM-level accuracy with relative errors below 5%, while reducing the total response evaluation time (including full-field reconstruction) by approximately 60x; excluding the post-processing reconstruction step, the AD-DeepONet inference is up to four orders of magnitude faster than FEM. In addition, the framework enables rapid generation of full-field responses, influence lines, and influence surfaces under arbitrary vehicular loading configurations, demonstrating strong potential for large-scale bridge analysis and digital twin applications.

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

Zero-order Parameter-free Optimization for LMO-based Methods: Novel Approach for Efficient Fine-tuning

arXiv:2606.14970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has become a central application of modern optimization, enabling pretrained models to adapt to diverse downstream tasks and domain-specific data. A major obstacle in large-scale fine-tuning is the memory overhead of backpropagation, which requires storing activations, gradients, and optimizer states. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization offers a memory-efficient alternative, but its performance is highly sensitive to the stepsize and smoothing parameter, often requiring costly task-specific tuning. Parameter-free (PF) optimization addresses this issue by adapting algorithmic parameters without prior knowledge of problem-dependent constants. Moreover, large-scale fine-tuning can benefit from geometry-aware updates that account for the heterogeneous structure of parameter blocks, which can be modeled through methods that exploit linear minimization oracle (LMO). In this work, we study PF adaptation for LMO-based ZO optimization and introduce $\texttt{AdaNAGED}$, a method that unifies gradient-free training, adaptive tuning, and non-Euclidean update geometry. We establish convergence guarantees and validate the method on large-scale LLM fine-tuning task with $\texttt{OPT}-1.3\mathrm{B}$ model.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Agent-as-a-Router: Agentic Model Routing for Coding Tasks

arXiv:2606.22902v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-world users typically have access to multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) from different providers, and these LLMs often excel at distinct domains, yet none dominate all. Consequently, routing each task to the most suitable model becomes critical for both performance and cost. Existing routers treat this as a static, one-off classification problem. However, we identify the performance bottleneck for these routers as information deficit: simply augmenting a vanilla LLM router with performance statistics at the task-dimension level yields a 15.3% relative gain, surpassing a heuristic router built on the same dimension-level priors. Motivated by this finding, we propose Agent-as-a-Router, a framework that formalizes routing as a C-A-F loop (Context->Action->Feedback->Context). It closes the information gap by accumulating execution-grounded experience during deployment. We instantiate this framework as ACRouter, composed of an Orchestrator, a Verifier, a Memory module, and introduce CodeRouterBench, an evaluation environment comprising ~10K task instances with verified scores from 8 frontier LLMs, enabling regret-based router comparison on streaming tasks. Experiments show that ACRouter achieves the lowest cumulative regret on in-distribution tasks and generalizes to out-of-distribution agentic-programming tasks, demonstrating that our routing framework actively closes the information gap. Codes and benchmarks are released at https://github.com/LanceZPF/agent-as-a-router.

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

First, do NOHARM: towards clinically safe large language models

arXiv:2512.01241v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are routinely used by physicians and patients for medical advice, yet their clinical safety profiles remain poorly characterized. We present NOHARM (Numerous Options Harm Assessment for Risk in Medicine), a 1,100-task benchmark of primary care-to-specialist consultation cases to measure the frequency and severity of harm from LLM-generated medical recommendations. NOHARM covers 10 specialties, with 12,747 expert annotations for 4,249 clinical management options. Across 28 LLMs, recommendations carried the potential for severe harm in up to 22.6% of cases, with errors of omission accounting for more than 80% of severe errors. In a randomized trial of 101 generalist physicians, human benchmark performance significantly improved with AI assistance, yet physicians remained far from realizing the potential of AI tools, frequently ignoring essential advice surfaced by AI. Safety performance tracked general-intelligence and medical-knowledge benchmarks across the full range of models but decoupled at the frontier. Despite strong performance on existing evaluations, widely used AI models can produce medical advice with the potential for severe harm at non-trivial rates, highlighting the importance of explicit measurement of clinical safety.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Language-Instructed Vision Embeddings for Controllable and Generalizable Perception

Vision foundation models are typically trained as static feature extractors, placing the burden of task adaptation onto large downstream models. We propose an alternative paradigm: instead of solely feeding visual features into language models, we use language itself to dynamically guide the vision encoder. Our method, Language-Instructed Vision Embeddings (LIVE), leverages language as high-level guidance to produce task-centric embeddings at inference time, removing the need for task-specific retraining. This enables the encoder to focus on contextually relevant aspects of the input, yielding more controllable and generalizable representations. Empirically, LIVE reduces visual hallucinations (+34 points on MMVP), surpasses vision-language models with orders of magnitude more parameters on visual question answering, and generalizes to unseen instructions and tasks – offering a direct path toward adaptive, instruction-driven visual intelligence.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian for Projective Quantum Feature Maps

arXiv:2606.13641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Projected quantum feature maps provide a strategy for using quantum processors as feature generators for classical machine-learning models. Building on counterdiabatic Ising-glass and one-dimensional Heisenberg PQFMs, we introduce a generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian-based PQFM that provides a unified way to encode classical features through local Pauli fields and pairwise two-qubit Pauli interactions. This construction allows distinct classical variables to be embedded along different Pauli axes of the same qubit, increasing the information density of shallow circuits while remaining compatible with hardware constraints. We develop and implement these methods in pqfmlib, a publicly available Python library for constructing, executing, and benchmarking Hamiltonian-based PQFMs.We then benchmark the generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs against reference PQFMs on four biomedical classification datasets under a nested cross-validation protocol with paired statistical tests. Quantum features are generated using both IBM quantum processors with up to 156 qubits and statevector simulations. Our results show that the generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian family provides the most consistent pattern of statistically supported gains over matched classical baselines, although the performance of all methods depends on the dataset, encoding strategy, measured observables, and hardware conditions. These findings support generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs as a promising route toward near-term quantum utility.

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

Fine-Grained Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Fined-Grained Prompts: Task, Dataset and Benchmark

Open-vocabulary detectors are proposed to locate and recognize objects in novel classes. However, variations in vision-aware language vocabulary data used for open-vocabulary learning can lead to unfair and unreliable evaluations. Recent evaluation methods have attempted to address this issue by incorporating object properties or adding locations and characteristics to the captions. Nevertheless, since these properties and locations depend on the specific details of the images instead of classes, detectors can not make accurate predictions without precise descriptions provided through human annotation. This paper introduces 3F-OVD, a novel task that extends supervised fine-grained object detection to the open-vocabulary setting. Our task is intuitive and challenging, requiring a deep understanding of Fine-grained captions and careful attention to Fine-grained details in images in order to accurately detect Fine-grained objects. Additionally, due to the scarcity of qualified fine-grained object detection datasets, we have created a new dataset, NEU-171K, tailored for both supervised and open-vocabulary settings. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detectors on our dataset for both settings. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective post-processing technique. Our data, annotations and codes are available at https://github.com/tengerye/3FOVD.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

From "Aha Moments" to Controllable Thinking: Toward Meta-Cognitive Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models via Decoupled Reasoning and Control

arXiv:2508.04460v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can exhibit step-by-step reasoning, reflection, and backtracking, but these behaviors are often unregulated, leading to overthinking. As a result, LRMs continue generating redundant reasoning even after reaching high-confidence conclusions. This increases inference cost and latency, limiting practical deployment. The root cause is the absence of an intrinsic mechanism to monitor the reasoning state and decide when to continue, backtrack, or stop. We propose MERA, a meta-cognitive reasoning framework that decouples reasoning from control to enable independent optimization of control strategies. MERA constructs high-quality reasoning-control supervision data via a takeover-based pipeline, and transforms long-horizon traces into structured reasoning-control alternating sequences for training. The model is trained with supervised fine-tuning to internalize the structured separation, and further optimized with Control-Segment Policy Optimization (CSPO), which combines segment-wise GRPO with control masking to focus learning on control segments. Experiments across reasoning benchmarks show that MERA improves both efficiency and accuracy.

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

Stochastic Schrödinger Diffusion Models for Pure-State Ensemble Generation

arXiv:2605.03573v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum machine learning increasingly relies on pure-state representations, motivating generative models that sample directly in quantum representation space rather than perturbing classical inputs and re-encoding. We introduce Stochastic Schrödinger Diffusion Models (SSDMs), a score-based generative framework that defines diffusion, scores, and reverse-time sampling intrinsically on the complex projective manifold $\mathbb{CP}^{d-1}$ under the Fubini–Study metric. SSDMs combine a Riemannian Ornstein–Uhlenbeck forward diffusion with a stochastic Schrödinger realization, and learn reverse-time dynamics driven by the Riemannian score. Our central technical contribution is a local-time learning objective that exploits the local Euclidean OU limit of intrinsic manifold diffusions in Fubini-Study normal coordinates to obtain an analytic teacher score, bypassing the intractable transition densities that limit existing Riemannian score-based models. Across synthetic, physics-inspired (TFIM, XXZ), and quantum feature-state benchmarks up to $14$ qubits, SSDMs match target pure-state ensembles by orders of magnitude on MMD and observable statistics over both ambient Euclidean and matched Riemannian score-based baselines, and improve representation-level diagnostics for downstream quantum kernel methods.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

SMT-AD: a scalable quantum-inspired anomaly detection approach

arXiv:2604.06265v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum-inspired tensor networks algorithms have shown to be effective and efficient models for machine learning tasks, including anomaly detection. Here, we propose a highly parallelizable quantum-inspired approach which we call SMT-AD from Superposition of Multiresolution Tensors for Anomaly Detection. It is based upon the superposition of bond-dimension-1 matrix product operators to transform the input data with Fourier-assisted feature embedding, where the number of learnable parameters grows linearly with feature size, embedding resolutions, and the number of additional components in the matrix product operators structure. We demonstrate successful anomaly detection when applied to standard datasets, including credit card transactions, and find that, even with minimal configurations, it achieves competitive performance against established anomaly detection baselines. Furthermore, it provides a straightforward way to reduce the weight of the model and even improve the performance by highlighting the most relevant input features.

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

Offline Preference-Based Trajectory Evaluation

arXiv:2606.17541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline evaluation of agentic systems often collapses trajectories to terminal success, discarding information about partial progress and inducing widespread ties, creating substantial statistical inefficiency by reducing effective sample size and weakening the ability to distinguish systems. We propose preference-based trajectory evaluation, which compares trajectories directly through temporal preferences over progress and time-to-return profiles. We find that, across diverse agentic and interactive benchmarks, standard success-based metrics produce tied comparisons on roughly 75% of instances, whereas trajectory-aware preferences reduce ties to roughly 35%, improving discriminative power, ranking stability, and data efficiency. Our results suggest that benchmark saturation, often attributed to poor data collection or problem difficulty, may also be explained by the choice of evaluation measure.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Which Models Perform Better in Inheritance Reasoning?

This paper presents the participation of team PSL in the QIAS 2026 Shared Task on Arabic Islamic inheritance reasoning. The task evaluates the ability of large language models to solve inheritance cases that require legal interpretation, multi-step reasoning, and precise numerical computation. We compare commercial and open-source models under a unified prompting strategy to assess their effectiveness in structured legal reasoning with minimal task-specific adaptation. \\ Our results show a clear gap in reliability between the two model families. Commercial models demonstrate stronger performance in identifying eligible heirs, applying exclusion rules, and maintaining consistency across reasoning steps. In contrast, open-source models exhibit greater instability, particularly in cases involving dependent legal decisions and fractional share adjustments. The best performance is achieved by Gemini 2.5 Flash, with an MRE of $0.989$.

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

Skill-Guided Continuation Distillation for GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.18890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving GUI agents typically relies on behavior cloning on expert trajectories. However, as the current policy deviates from the expert policy, it inevitably encounters policy-induced off-trajectory states during closed-loop execution, i.e., states that fall outside the expert trajectories. Since expert trajectories provide no demonstrations for these unseen states, such states receive no effective supervision, leaving the policy unable to select the correct action. To close this supervision gap, we propose Skill-Guided Continuation Distillation (SGCD), an iterative self-improvement framework. SGCD first runs the plain policy without skill guidance for a few steps to reach realistic off-trajectory states. From these states, a skill-guided policy then completes the task and produces successful continuations, which are mixed with expert trajectories to supply supervision over policy-induced off-trajectory states. The skills are extracted from both successful and failed rollouts, consisting of Continuation Plans, Critical Targets, Failure Traps, and Success Criteria. On OSWorld-Verified, SGCD improves the success rate of three base models from the low-30\% range to over 50\%, demonstrating its effectiveness and generality.

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

Multi-Turn Reflective Masking Elicits Reasoning in Mask Diffusion Models

While reasoning on autoregressive (AR) models is often performed by chain-of-thought reasoning and reflection, their refinement of previous outputs still relies on fully sequential generation, even when only local edits are needed. In contrast, the masking mechanism in Mask Diffusion Models (MDMs) naturally supports explicit local edits on previous outputs, allowing selective refinement without discarding previous answers and generating another from scratch. While this property more closely aligns with how humans correct mistakes by iterative local refinement, existing MDMs do not support multi-turn masking and denoising. We propose Reflective Masking (RM), which elicits such an intrinsic reasoning capability in MDMs via lightweight post-training. RM provides a native test-time scaling, where an MDM iteratively revisits and revises its prior outputs based on evolving context. To exploit insights from previous turns like AR reasoning, we further introduce History Reference, a parameter-free mechanism that leverages intermediate denoising states during revision. Our approach requires no architectural changes and is easily applicable to existing MDMs. Across diverse tasks and modalities, including text generation, Sudoku, and image editing, Reflective Masking consistently outperforms standard masking-based baselines and demonstrates strong generality, positioning RM as a fundamental primitive for reasoning on MDMs.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum mechanics over real numbers fully reproduces standard quantum theory

arXiv:2604.19482v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard quantum mechanics employs complex Hilbert spaces, but whether complex numbers are fundamental or merely convenient has long been debated. For decades, real-valued equivalents were considered mathematically possible but cumbersome. However, a highly cited 2021 result claimed that any quantum theory based on real numbers is experimentally falsifiable via network Bell experiments. Yet, it remains an open question whether this falsification applies to all real-valued theories. Here we show that this conclusion rests on an incomplete real formulation, and we present a rigorous real-valued framework that perfectly reproduces all predictions of standard quantum mechanics. We demonstrate that the standard real tensor product ($\otimes_{\mathbb{R}}$) used in previous no-go theorems is algebraically incompatible with the rich structure of conventional quantum mechanics. We present a real framework based on K\"{a}hler space and prove that it is exactly isomorphic to established quantum mechanics via an explicit bijection $\gamma$. The isomorphism extends to composite systems through a symplectic composition rule $\otimes^{\ks}$ that replaces the Kronecker product. Consequently, our formulation achieves the maximal $\mathrm{CHSH}_{3}$ violation of $6\sqrt{2}$ using purely real variables, demonstrating that the no-go theorem is specific to a particular real representation of states and operators and to the composition rule $\otimes_\mathbb{R}$ built upon it, neither of which extends to the present K\"{a}hler framework. These results demonstrate that complex numbers are not fundamentally required by nature; rather, they encode a deeper real geometric structure that governs quantum interference and entanglement, settling this long debate.

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

UniIntervene: Agentic Intervention for Efficient Real-World Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.12372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (HiL-RL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for real-world robotic manipulation, enabling online policy improvement with human guidance. However, current HiL-RL frameworks remain intervention-intensive, relying on frequent human corrections to redirect the policy out of unproductive exploration, which incurs high labor cost and limits real-world scalability. To address this, we propose UniIntervene, an agentic intervention model that detects unproductive exploration and autonomously recovers the policy toward high-value states, taking over the bulk of interventions from human operators. Specifically, UniIntervene first performs future-conditioned action-value estimation, predicting the latent consequence of the current action and evaluating its induced value, which provides a more stable progress signal. Building on this, a temporal value-risk critic aggregates recent value dynamics and triggers intervention when the estimated value exhibits sustained stagnation or degradation. When intervention is required, UniIntervene retrieves a high-value recovery target from a memory of past intervention episodes and produces executable corrective actions through a goal-conditioned recovery policy. In this way, UniIntervene turns intervention from passive human correction into a value-aware recovery process for efficient real-world RL. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that UniIntervene improves the average success rate by 8.6% while reducing human interventions by 57% relative to state-of-the-art HiL-RL baselines.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Branching-selection particle systems and inverse first passage problems

作者:

arXiv:2606.13487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A generalised inverse first passage problem asks whether, given a probability measure $p$ on $[0,\infty]$, one can find a boundary $b:[0,\infty]\to \mathbb{R}$ such that the stopping time:\[\tau:=\inf\left\{t:\Lambda\int_0^t \omega(W_s-b(s))ds \geq U\right\}\] has distribution $p$, where $U\sim Exp(1)$, $\Lambda\in(0,\infty)$ and $\omega$ is a monotonic decreasing function. We construct a branching-selection particle system whose hydrodynamic limit is governed by a free boundary problem and connect this to the generalised inverse first passage problem. In the $N$-particle system, particles move as independent Brownian motions, branch at a prescribed rate, and are removed at a rate proportional to their location relative to a position $b^N(t)$ which is a function of the empirical distribution. We identify the limit of $b^N$ as the solution of the inverse first passage problem.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Quantum steering in networks: Measurement-device-independent detection, continuous variables, and practical Gaussian schemes

arXiv:2606.25690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider quantum steering certification in multipartite networks, with a focus on minimal trust scenarios: all-except-one parties are untrusted and treated device-independently. We show that it is always possible to lift steering certification to the measurement-device-independent regime, in which even the (last) trusted party can treat their local hardware as a black-box, except for a set of fiduciary quantum states used as the inputs to the experiment. This holds both for finite-dimensional systems as well as for bosonic continuous-variable systems, for which we provide a full characterization in the bipartite case. Additionally, we introduce measurement-device-independent network steering protocols based entirely on Gaussian operations – which cannot be used for fully device-independent protocols, and thus become instead a viable option for minimal trust certification as soon as a single trusted input is inserted in the network. Our results present a basis for steering-based applications (such as randomness generation) with minimal trust beyond full nonlocality and with feasible experimental requirements.

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

Grounding Multi-Hop Reasoning in Structural Causal Models via Group Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv:2605.01482v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-Hop Fact Verification requires complex reasoning across disparate evidence, posing significant challenges for Large Language Models , which may suffer from hallucinations and fractured logical chains. Existing methods, while improving transparency via Chain-of-Thought , often lack explicit modeling of the structural dependencies between evidence and claims. In this work, we introduce an SCM-inspired framework that grounds reasoning in explicit directed dependency graphs, treating verification as a constructive structural reasoning process rather than full causal inference with interventions or counterfactual semantics. We empirically identify an "inverted U-shaped" correlation between reasoning-chain length and accuracy, revealing that excessive structural complexity can degrade performance. To address this, we propose a rule-based reinforcement learning strategy using Group Relative Policy Optimization. This approach dynamically optimizes the trade-off between structural depth and conciseness. Extensive experiments on HoVer and EX-FEVER demonstrate that our SCM-GRPO framework outperforms strong baselines while producing more traceable reasoning structures for complex fact verification.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

CrossFusion: A Multi-Scale Cross-Attention Convolutional Fusion Model for Cancer Survival Prediction

Cancer survival prediction from whole slide images (WSIs) is a challenging task in computational pathology due to the large size, irregular shape, and high granularity of the WSIs. These characteristics make it difficult to capture the full spectrum of patterns, from subtle cellular abnormalities to complex tissue interactions, which are crucial for accurate prognosis. To address this, we propose CrossFusion, a novel multi-scale feature integration framework that extracts and fuses information from patches across different magnification levels. By effectively modeling both scale-specific patterns and their interactions, CrossFusion generates a rich feature set that enhances survival prediction accuracy. We validate our approach across six cancer types from public datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, when coupled with domain-specific feature extraction backbones, our method shows further gains in prognostic performance compared to general-purpose backbones. The source code is available at: https://github.com/RustinS/CrossFusion