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.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Multiple Fault Analysis and Drug Therapy on Signaling Pathways Using Dynamic Bayesian Network-based Model

Cell growth is an intricate biological phenomenon that is closely regulated by the interplay between various growth factors and transcription factors. Signaling pathways are the main mediators in this event, which provide the driving force for mitosis or sometimes meiosis. However, when malfunctions occur within the biological network, they can cause uncontrolled cell division, regardless of external stimuli. By employing Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs), these malfunctions can be explicitly simulated, offering insights into their effects on cellular behavior and growth regulation. To a significant extent, the resultant outcomes can be mitigated through the use of reduced drug combinations. This study delves into the intricacies of signaling pathway behavior under the influence of concurrent malfunctions. Initially, we replicate the effects of these dysfunctions within DBNs. Subsequently, drug therapy is applied to alleviate their impact. Our methodology introduces a parameter known as efficiency_score, enabling the identification of optimized drug combinations without prior knowledge of specific dysfunctions. Particularly relevant in the context of realistic cancer conditions, these tailored drug inhibition points demonstrate enhanced efficacy compared to conventional treatments. Leveraging GPU acceleration throughout the modeling process accelerates the analysis of multiple faults within the biological networks, rendering our approach notably faster and more efficient.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

When the Chain of Thought Knows Better: Failure Modes in Multi-Turn Reasoning Models

Failures in multi-turn reasoning models are largely invisible to terminal-score evaluation. A model can lock onto an unsafe stance early in a long dialogue, yet its final-turn refusal rate may appear indistinguishable from a robustly aligned baseline. To expose these hidden temporal dynamics, we propose a trace-level diagnostic - the CoT-Output 2x2 safety matrix. This framework labels every turn along two independent axes (internal reasoning and visible output), yielding four operationally defined failure cells: robust alignment, alignment faking, overt jailbreak, and a distinct failure mode we term context-injection failure (where the CoT maintains safe reasoning, but the visible output produces harm, highlighting a multi-turn manifestation of reasoning unfaithfulness). We evaluate three distilled reasoning targets against a fixed attacker across five oversight conditions, collecting 6750 turn-level observations on the Information-Hazard scenario. Our analysis reveals two reproducible vulnerabilities: an oversight paradox where explicit monitoring cues paradoxically increase alignment-faking rates rather than suppress them, and a context-injection failure where models lock onto unsafe external outputs despite safe internal states. We release the full dataset of multi-turn dialogues and CoT traces to support follow-up trace-diagnostic research.

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

Physics in 2-Steps: Locking Motion Priors Before Visual Refinement Erases Them

Image-to-Video diffusion models leverage input images to generate visually stunning content, yet frequently produce motion that violates physical laws. We reveal a surprising finding: a 2-step generation often exhibits better physical consistency than a 50-step output from the same model. Through spectral analysis, we trace this to phase erosion during denoising; the phase degrades significantly (dropping by $\approx 18\%$ from step 2 to step 50), whereas the magnitude remains relatively stable. Building on this insight, we propose PhaseLock, a training-free framework that preserves the valid motion priors from few-step inference throughout the denoising trajectory. Rather than relying on full-step inference for physical consistency, PhaseLock extracts a motion prior from just 2 steps and enforces it onto high-fidelity generation via Latent Delta Guidance. Our approach effectively mitigates phase degradation, improving physical consistency by an average of 6.2 points across diverse models while largely maintaining visual fidelity, with negligible overhead ($1.06\times$ time, $1.02\times$ memory) and reduced reliance on expensive external guidance methods ($\sim5\times$ time). Project Page: https://dnwjddl.github.io/phaselock

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

Explainable deep learning improves human mental models of self-driving cars

arXiv:2411.18714v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-driving cars increasingly rely on deep neural networks to achieve human-like driving. The opacity of such black-box planners makes it challenging to accurately anticipate when they will fail, with potentially catastrophic consequences. While research into interpreting these systems has surged, most of it is confined to simulations or toy setups due to the difficulty of real-world deployment, leaving the practical utility of such techniques unknown. Here, we introduce the Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net), a method for faithfully explaining the behavior of machine-learning-based planners that causally grounds their reasoning in human-interpretable concepts without sacrificing performance. We deploy CW-Net on a real self-driving car and show that the resulting explanations improve the human driver's mental model of the vehicle, allowing them to better predict its behavior, particularly in surprising situations. This demonstrates that explainable deep learning integrated into self-driving cars can be both understandable and useful in a realistic deployment setting. We anticipate our method could be applied to other safety-critical systems, such as autonomous drones and robotic surgeons, as well as to other architectures, such as end-to-end learning systems and vision-language-action models. Overall, our study establishes a deployment-validated pathway to interpretability for autonomous agents, which could help make them more transparent and safe.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Artificial Intelligence in Ship Finance: Applications, Opportunities, and a Case Study in AI-Augmented Loan Origination

arXiv:2606.11238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ship finance is a data-intensive and document-heavy segment of asset-based lending, requiring the integration of financial, technical, contractual, and regulatory information from heterogeneous and largely unstructured sources. Increasing environmental regulation and ESG reporting requirements are adding further complexity to underwriting and loan-origination processes. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), create new opportunities for processing and analysing such information. This paper reviews potential applications of AI in ship finance, with a particular focus on LLM-based systems for document comprehension, information extraction, and workflow automation. We present ShipFinance.ai, a modular agentic architecture to support loan application workflows in ship finance. The proposed system combines an LLM-based extraction module, financial analysis components, external maritime data services, and a controlled document-generation module with a chatbot interface to support the preparation of standardized financing applications. The paper discusses the key challenges for using such models in production. We argue that AI-assisted systems can support maritime finance professionals in managing increasingly complex information and reporting requirements.

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

Towards Spec Learning: Inference-Time Alignment from Preference Pairs

Steering a large language model (LLM) toward a desired behavior typically relies on an iterative process of hand-crafting a prompt based on a careful inspection of the model's responses. This is an involved, brittle, and error-prone process. Preference-based fine-tuning is a more rigorous but often prohibitively expensive solution. We propose spec learning, a framework that relies on a brief user instruction and a small set of preference judgments. These are compiled into specifications in the form of natural-language prompts for an LLM. Specifications condition LLMs at inference time, and no parameter updates to the underlying models are required. We show that the responses generated based on the compiled specifications often outperform direct preference optimization (DPO) on datasets from specialized domains whose preference signal is dense. Unlike opaque weight updates, the resulting specifications are human-readable and double as interpretable and transparent written embodiments of the preference signal that produced them.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

SoftMatcha 2: A Fast and Soft Pattern Matcher for Trillion-Scale Corpora

We present SoftMatcha 2, an ultra-fast and flexible search algorithm that enables search over trillion-scale natural language corpora in under 0.3 seconds while allowing semantic variations in the form of substitution, insertion, and deletion. Our approach employs string matching based on suffix arrays that scales well with corpus size, and represents words as vectors, which underpin its semantic flexibility. To mitigate the combinatorial explosion induced by the semantic relaxation of queries, our method is built on two key algorithmic ideas: dynamic corpus-aware pruning and fast exact lookup enabled by a disk-aware design. We theoretically analyze the efficiency of the proposed method, indicating that it can mitigate exponential growth in the search space. Empirically, on FineWeb-Edu (Lozhkov et al., 2024) (1.4T tokens), it attains substantially lower search latency than existing methods: infini-gram (Liu et al., 2024), infini-gram mini (Xu et al., 2025), and SoftMatcha (Deguchi et al., 2025). As a practical application, our method uncovers benchmark contamination in training corpora that existing approaches miss, and it also benefits information retrieval and paraphrase detection. We also provide an online demo of fast, soft search across corpora in seven languages.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Closing the Approximation Gap in Simulation-free Latent SDEs

arXiv:2606.16138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering dynamical systems from noisy observations is a recurring challenge across scientific domains, including neuroscience and physics. Latent stochastic differential equations (SDEs) address this by modeling the system as an unobserved state that evolves according to a learnable SDE and generates the observations. Variational inference (VI) provides a tractable objective for fitting latent SDEs. Traditional VI algorithms evaluate this objective by numerical simulation over a time discretization, trading fidelity for computational cost. A recent class of algorithms, simulation-free VI, sidesteps this tradeoff by parameterizing the posterior through its instantaneous marginals rather than its drift. In this work, we show that the efficiency of existing simulation-free VI algorithms comes at a price: their parameterizations restrict the approximate posterior to a subset of the SDEs available to simulation-based methods, degrading posterior inference and parameter learning. We propose Helmholtz-SDE, a simulation-free VI algorithm that closes this gap by optimizing over path laws compatible with a prescribed collection of marginals. Helmholtz-SDE recovers dynamics more faithfully than prior simulation-free methods, with the largest gains under high posterior uncertainty. It further matches the performance of simulation-based VI at a fraction of the runtime.

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

SCC-Loc: A Unified Semantic Cascade Consensus Framework for UAV Thermal Geo-Localization

Cross-modal Thermal Geo-localization (TG) provides a robust, all-weather solution for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. However, profound thermal-visible modality gaps introduce severe feature ambiguity, systematically corrupting conventional coarse-to-fine registration. To dismantle this bottleneck, we propose SCC-Loc, a unified Semantic-Cascade-Consensus localization framework. By sharing a single DINOv2 backbone across global retrieval and MINIMA$_{RoMa}$ matching, it minimizes memory footprint and achieves zero-shot, highly accurate absolute position estimation. Specifically, we tackle modality ambiguity by introducing three cohesive components. First, we design the Semantic-Guided Viewport Alignment (SGVA) module to adaptively optimize satellite crop regions, effectively correcting initial spatial deviations. Second, we develop the Cascaded Spatial-Adaptive Texture-Structure Filtering (C-SATSF) mechanism to explicitly enforce geometric consistency, thereby eradicating dense cross-modal outliers. Finally, we propose the Consensus-Driven Reliability-Aware Position Selection (CD-RAPS) strategy to derive the optimal solution through a synergy of physically constrained pose optimization. To address data scarcity, we construct Thermal-UAV, a comprehensive dataset providing 11,890 diverse thermal queries referenced against a large-scale satellite ortho-photo and corresponding spatially aligned Digital Surface Model (DSM). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCC-Loc establishes a new state-of-the-art, suppressing the mean localization error to 9.37 m and providing a 7.6-fold accuracy improvement within a strict 5-m threshold over the strongest baseline. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/FloralHercules/SCC-Loc.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Contrastive Regularization for Accent-Robust ASR

arXiv:2605.03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability. We investigate supervised contrastive learning (SupCon) as a lightweight, accent-invariant auxiliary objective for CTC fine-tuning. An utterance-level contrastive loss regularizes encoder representations without architectural modification or explicit accent supervision. Experiments on the L2-ARCTIC benchmark show consistent WER reductions across multiple pretrained encoders, with up to 25 – 29\% relative reduction under unseen-accent evaluation. Analysis using within-transcript cosine dispersion indicates that SupCon promotes more compact and stable representation geometry under accent variability. Overall, SupCon provides an effective and model-agnostic regularization strategy for improving accent robustness.

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

On the Optimal Reasoning Length for RL-Trained Language Models

Reinforcement learning substantially improves reasoning in large language models, but it also tends to lengthen chain-of-thought outputs and increase computational cost. Although length-control methods have been proposed, the length-accuracy relationship they induce remains unclear. We train policies with several length-control methods on multiple base models in a controlled setup and find that, across both mathematical reasoning and code generation, accuracy is non-monotonic in output length, peaking at an intermediate value. Mode accuracy, however, continues to improve with length even in settings where sample accuracy plateaus or declines, indicating that the non-monotonic length-accuracy relationship is driven by dispersion around an increasingly correct center.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Ranking-optimized survival models can underperform fixed-horizon clinical prediction: a SUPPORT2 reanalysis of machine learning, attending-physician judgment, and the original SUPPORT model at 60- and 180-day mortality

Machine-learning survival models are increasingly proposed for intensive-care mortality prediction and are almost always selected and reported using the concordance index, a ranking metric averaged over follow-up. Yet most bedside decisions hinge on a probability at a specific time, such as 60- or 180-day mortality. We asked whether ranking-optimized models remain competitive at fixed clinical horizons against two reference points clinicians actually rely on: unaided attending-physician judgment and the original 1995 SUPPORT logistic model. Reanalyzing the SUPPORT2 cohort (9,105 critically ill adults from five United States centers, 1989-1994) under a stratified 70/15/15 split, we compared a gradient-boosted survival model, the physician's recorded prognosis, and the 1995 model at 60 and 180 days, alongside several alternative learners. The survival model achieved competitive ranking concordance (0.705) yet underperformed both comparators at fixed horizons: at 60 days its area under the ROC curve was 0.750, against 0.808 for physicians on the matched sample and 0.827 for the 1995 model, a gap that held across eight independent data splits and remained statistically reliable after multiplicity correction. The shortfall was not miscalibration, since post-hoc recalibration left discrimination unchanged, nor limited capacity, since neural networks, a deep ranking model, and two timepoint-aware discrete-time models also failed to close it; replacing the ranking objective with timepoint-matched binary training recovered roughly half the gap, pointing to an objective-horizon mismatch. Discrimination was equitable across sex, race, and age, but leave-one-disease-out validation exposed severe failure for disease groups absent from training, and the physician advantage was conditional on a physician electing to provide an estimate. We recommend reporting timepoint-specific discrimination alongside concordance, timepoint-matched training when fixed-horizon predictions drive care, leave-one-subgroup validation, and distribution-free prediction intervals to support selective deployment.

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

Second-order PACF asymptotics and discrimination between fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$

作者:

arXiv:2605.31416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$ have the same long-memory pole $|\theta|^{-2d}$ and hence the same leading PACF law $\alpha(n)\sim d/n$. We show that this agreement breaks at the first non-universal order. For $0

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Associations Between Social Responsiveness and Sleep Disruption are Modulated by Chronotype in Early Adolescence: Cross-Sectional and Prospective Findings from 10,108 Participants of the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study

Background: Sleep disruption is prevalent in people with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism but is not clear whether it occurs as an endophenotype or secondary to other behaviours. The ABCD Study is a population-based longitudinal study that monitors the health, demography and lifestyle of over 11,000 children in the US. In this study we leverage these data to investigate whether traits consistent with autism (social responsiveness) are associated with sleep disruption independent of lifestyle and other behavioural measures. Methods: Autistic traits were assessed using the Social Responsiveness Scale at age 11, and sleep disruption and behavioural outcomes were assessed at ages 11 and 13 years using the Sleep Disturbance Scale, and the Child Behaviour Check List, respectively. Demographic, health and lifestyle-related variables were assessed by caregiver questionnaires. Regression models were applied to investigate associations between autistic traits and sleep outcomes. Results: There was a significant cross-sectional association between sleep disturbance and SRS at age 11 years old that was independent of sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic position, physical activity, sedentary behaviour and anxiety/depression ({beta} = 0.12, 95% CI (0.07, 0.17); p < 0.001), that persisted at age 13, and that was modulated by chronotype, with evening types showing a stronger association. Discussion: Social responsiveness assessed in early adolescence (age 11) were associated with sleep disruption independent of multiple confounding factors and were prospectively associated with sleep disruption at age 13 years. These findings contribute to the evidence that disruption of sleep and circadian timing may have a primary role in the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate autistic traits.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

ASSCG: Just-Right Gating over Chattering for Fast-Slow LLM Planning in Autonomous Driving

Large language models (LLMs) can improve autonomous driving planning but are costly to query online, and existing fast-slow planners often rely on hand-designed triggering rules that either over-call the slow system or call it at the wrong times. We formulate slow-system invocation as a resource-aware sequential decision problem and propose the Adaptive Slow-System Control Gate (ASSCG), which makes frame-level Query/Cache/Drop decisions to refresh, reuse, or suppress slow guidance. ASSCG uses an RWKV backbone for efficient long-horizon gating and is trained with supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO-style compute-aware reinforcement fine-tuning. We apply ASSCG to two different fast-slow architectures: (i) AsyncDriver on nuPlan Hard20 closed-loop evaluation, where ASSCG improves score to 67.28 (+2.28) while reducing average end-to-end inference latency by 60%; and (ii) a RecogDrive-based dual system that we build by replacing its original VLM-2B module with a lightweight ViT-based fast planner and adding an LLM slow planner, evaluated on NAVSIM, where ASSCG achieves 91.4 PDMS (+0.6) and increases average speed by 25%. The project page, including video visualizations and additional results, is available at https://williamxuanyu.github.io/asscg/.

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

Model Validation of Agentic AI Systems: A POMDP-Based Framework for Belief-State, Forecast, and Policy Validation

arXiv:2606.17383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic artificial intelligence systems introduce a new class of model risk. Unlike traditional predictive models, autonomous agents continuously acquire information, form beliefs regarding latent states of the environment, generate forecasts, select actions, and adapt their behavior over time. Existing validation methodologies focus primarily on predictive accuracy and therefore provide limited insight into the quality of the underlying decision process. This paper proposes a model validation framework for agentic AI based on Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). The framework decomposes autonomous decision making into information, beliefs, forecasts, actions, and utility, allowing each component to be validated independently. Large language models (LLMs) are formalized as approximate Bayesian filtering operators, and a model-risk taxonomy is developed encompassing state-space, filtering, forecast, policy, utility-specification, and parameter risks. The model risk validation methodology is demonstrated through a portfolio-management case study in which an agent infers latent market regimes from market and macroeconomic information, generates belief-conditioned forecasts, and constructs portfolios using a Black–Litterman framework. Empirical validation combines performance analysis, belief calibration diagnostics, coverage tests, ablation studies, and parameter-sensitivity analysis. The results indicate that latent-state inference contributes independently to decision quality and that the principal conclusions remain robust across a broad range of parameter values. The principal contribution of the paper is a practical framework for extending established model risk management concepts to autonomous AI systems and providing a rigorous foundation for their validation, governance, and monitoring.

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

Sakana Fugu Technical Report

arXiv:2606.21228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The capabilities of frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance, with different providers increasingly specializing in distinct domains. This raises a natural next objective: how to combine the individual specializations of various LLMs into a collectively intelligent system. To this end, we report the development of Sakana Fugu, a family of orchestrator models that harness and amplify the capabilities of an LLM agent team. Fugu models are themselves language models trained to understand user queries and dynamically devise agentic scaffolds to solve them. Through these adaptive scaffolds, Fugu accesses performance beyond any individual LLM agent, achieving state-of-the-art results compared to other publicly accessible models across a range of challenging tasks, including SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal Bench, LiveCodeBench, GPQA-Diamond, Humanity's Last Exam, and CharXiv Reasoning. We release two models: Fugu, which balances performance with latency for everyday use, and Fugu-Ultra, which prioritizes answer quality on the hardest problems. We describe our training paradigm, which encompasses large-scale fine-tuning, evolutionary algorithms, and reinforcement learning approaches, along with the infrastructure and core design principles that turn these methods into a production system. We hope this report encourages further research into multi-agent systems and dynamic, query-adaptive agentic scaffolds as a path toward the next frontier of AI capabilities, accessed through collective intelligence.

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

Beyond Global Replanning: Hierarchical Recovery for Cross-Device Agent Systems

Real-world computer-use tasks often span multiple applications and devices, requiring agents to coordinate heterogeneous environments under dynamic runtime failures. Existing multi-device agent systems support task decomposition and cross-device assignment, but recovery remains largely coarse-grained: when execution fails, they typically retry the same strategy, reassign the subtask, or revise the global plan, without systematically modeling the device-local strategy space. This limits their ability to distinguish failures that can be repaired within the current device from those that require cross-device replanning. We propose H-RePlan, a hierarchical replanning framework for multi-device agents with unified API–CLI–GUI execution. H-RePlan equips each device with interchangeable execution strategies and separates device-local strategy recovery from orchestrator-level global replanning through a compact cross-layer failure abstraction. To evaluate this capability, we introduce HeraBench, a fault-injected benchmark that constructs cross-device workflows over Linux and Android devices and injects strategy- and device-level failures. Experiments show that H-RePlan substantially outperforms single-strategy and coarse-grained multi-device baselines, achieving higher completion, instruction adherence, and perfect-pass rates while reducing the token cost required for reliable end-to-end success. These results demonstrate that scope-aware hierarchical recovery is essential for robust multi-device agent execution.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Sleep regularity outweighs sleep duration as a predictor of disease

Sleep regularity, the consistency of sleep-wake timing from one day to the next, is more strongly associated with longevity than adequate sleep duration. Whether this relationship persists across common diseases is unknown. We compared sleep regularity vs. sleep duration as risk factors for 199 diseases and disorders, using ten million hours of objective sleep-wake data (N=60,998, age[mean{+/-}SD]=62.8{+/-}7.8, 55% female). Multivariable-adjusted risks of incident diseases/disorders for regular/irregular and short/adequate sleepers were compared across 9.5 years of follow-up. Irregular sleep predicted risks for 131 diseases/disorders, more than double the number predicted by short sleep duration (63). Irregular sleep was a superior predictor than short sleep duration for 90 diseases/disorders, including circulatory, metabolic, digestive, renal, infectious, neurological, and musculoskeletal conditions, and mental disorders, whereas short sleep duration was the superior predictor for only 9 diseases/disorders. For models where short sleep duration explained disease risks, 83% were improved by adding sleep regularity. Sleep regularity was a stronger predictor of diseases/disorders than sleep duration in this cohort and should be considered an essential dimension of sleep health.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

RoPE-Aware Bit Allocation for KV-Cache Quantization

Existing low-bit KV-cache quantizers often treat each cached key as a flat vector. Under RoPE, however, a key's contribution to a future attention logit decomposes into a position-dependent sum over two-dimensional frequency blocks. This makes key-cache quantization a block-wise bit-allocation problem: high-energy RoPE blocks are more sensitive to quantization error and should receive more bits. We introduce Block-GTQ, a RoPE-aware bit allocator for key-cache quantization built on TurboQuant-MSE(TQ-MSE). For each layer and KV head, Block-GTQ computes a label-free energy score for each RoPE block and greedily allocates integer bit widths by marginal gain. Under matched K/V bit budgets, Block-GTQ better preserves RoPE query-key logits on a ten-model diagnostic panel, cutting per-layer MAE by 32-80% at 2 and 3 b/dim K-only quantization and winning all 367/367 layer comparisons against uniform TQ-MSE. These fidelity gains translate to stronger downstream long-context retrieval, understanding, and reasoning. At K2V2 on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Block-GTQ raises the six-task NIAH average from 70.6 to 97.4, and the LongBench-EN average from 36.87 to 53.31. On AIME 2024/2025 with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, without an fp16 recent-key buffer, Block-GTQ at K3V2 scores 51.7/37.5, close to fp16's 54.2/37.9, whereas uniform TQ-MSE collapses to 0.0/0.0. We further implement a packed-cache serving path. On a single H800 GPU with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, packed K3V3 achieves 3.24x KV-cache compression with fp16-comparable quality, runs 1.34x faster than fp16 FlashAttention2 at 128K context, reduces peak memory from 56.31 GB to 19.85 GB, and remains feasible at 256K and 512K where fp16 OOMs. Code is available at https://github.com/JIA-Lab-research/blockgtq.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

When Agent Automation Becomes Profitable: Quantifying and Insuring Autonomous AI Risk through Trace-Economic Underwriting

arXiv:2606.16465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents can now take irreversible actions in operational systems, but agent-caused losses are still not clearly assigned, priced, or transferred. Providers often disclaim consequential damages, users are left with uncompensated losses, and default human review limits the efficiency gains of automation. We ask when autonomous AI deployment can become economically acceptable despite failure risk. Our answer is to quantify risk at the customer-task-trace episode level and transfer it through insurance. Automation is acceptable when its expected benefit exceeds the premium, control cost, and remaining risk. This requires a defined role with bounded permissions and comparable traces. We introduce trace-economic underwriting, which maps tool-use traces to customer exposure and claimable loss, then uses this representation for pricing, control, and risk transfer. It uses deterministic economic labels rather than an LLM judge. In our trace-to-loss testbed, trace-economic pricing reduces pricing MAE from $17.7K to $569 and removes regressive cross-subsidy. A 300-trace expert audit accepts 295 labels unchanged. On 1,000 real SWE-smith traces, trace-conditioned controls reduce CVaR95 by 72%. Theorem~1 gives a finite-sample scope condition. We release code, labels, and audit sheets.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MBABench: Evaluating LLM Agents on End-to-End Spreadsheet Tasks in Finance

arXiv:2605.22664v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions. To meet enterprise needs, frontier AI labs have developed agents that can construct entire spreadsheets from scratch. This is especially relevant in finance, where core workflows such as financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis are commonly conducted through spreadsheets. Yet, existing spreadsheet benchmarks do not measure this advanced capability, focusing instead on question-answering or single-formula edits. To address this gap, we provide one of the first evaluations of agents on end-to-end spreadsheet tasks, focusing on economically critical financial workflows such as modeling and scenario analysis. Since deliverables therein are routinely reviewed and revised by multiple stakeholders, judging their quality necessarily involves high-level criteria such as readability or ease of modification. To reflect the multidimensional nature of solution quality, we develop an evaluation taxonomy comprising three dimensions: Accuracy, Formula, and Format, each comprising fine-grained criteria that reflect professional standards. The Claude family leads the benchmark and produces the most professional-looking outputs in our qualitative review, but even the strongest agents frequently fall short of professional finance standards and degrade sharply as the difficulty increases beyond a few chained calculations. This suggests that current agents are not yet able to reliably produce professional-quality spreadsheets at the level of complexity real-world workflows demand.

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

Facial Affect Analysis for Service-Oriented Systems: Advances, Challenges, and Future Visions

Facial Affect Analysis (FAA) is evolving from a stand-alone recognition task into a reusable perception capability for Service-Oriented Software Ecosystems (SoSE). This paper preserves the FAA methodological core while reframing recent advances through systems-engineering requirements for composable and dependable services. We review representative progress in static and dynamic expression analysis, action-unit and micro-expression modeling, and modern CNN, Transformer, graph, and hybrid architectures, then interpret these advances by their operational fit in edge, cloud, and hybrid service pipelines. The synthesis emphasizes SoSE concerns that determine deployability: service contracts for uncertainty-aware outputs, latency and availability envelopes, lifecycle monitoring and recalibration, governance-aware integration, and interoperability across independently evolving components. Our analysis shows that benchmark gains alone are insufficient for SoSE readiness; robustness under shift, intervention stability, fairness, privacy posture, and runtime guarantees are equally critical. We conclude with a roadmap for treating FAA as an operational service component with explicit interfaces, measurable quality attributes, and accountable lifecycle management.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Hierarchical mutual distillation for multi-view fusion: Learning from all possible view combinations

Multi-view learning often struggles to effectively leverage images captured from diverse angles and locations. Learning methods for unstructured multi-view images remain largely underexplored. We propose a novel Hierarchical Mutual Distillation for Multi-View Fusion (HMDMV) method, which can handle both structured and unstructured multi-view scenarios. It makes predictions utilizing all possible view combinations: single view, partial multi-view, and full multi-view. The method generates predictions for each view combination and then applies hierarchical mutual distillation to enhance inter-view consistency. An uncertainty-based weighting mechanism further refines the fusion process by adjusting the influence of each view combination according to its prediction confidence, reducing the impact of low-confidence views. Extensive experiments on large-scale structured and unstructured datasets demonstrate that HMDMV consistently achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy. Another unique advantage of HMDMV is that it provides improved flexibility in inference, allowing for more or fewer view counts in inference than those used in training without additional processing. We also provide a light version with reduced training cost by designing an efficient strategy that randomly samples subsets of view combinations during each training iteration. These results highlight HMDMV's robustness in real-world settings where view availability is variable or incomplete. The code is available at https://github.com/labhai/HMDMV.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Efficient Zeroth-Order Federated Finetuning of Language Models on Resource-Constrained Devices

arXiv:2502.10239v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a promising paradigm for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) across distributed data sources while preserving data privacy. However, finetuning such large models is challenging on edge devices due to its high resource demand. Zeroth-order Optimization (ZO) estimates gradients through finite-difference approximations, which rely on function evaluations under random perturbations of the model parameters. Consequently, ZO with task alignment provides a potential solution, allowing finetuning using only forward passes with inference-level memory requirements and low communication overhead, but it suffers from slow convergence and higher computational demand. In this paper, we propose a new ZO-based method that applies a more efficient technique to reduce the computational demand associated with using a large number of perturbations while preserving their convergence benefits. This is achieved by splitting the model into consecutive blocks and allocating a higher number of perturbations to the second block, enabling efficient reuse of intermediate activations to update the full network with fewer forward evaluations. Our evaluation on RoBERTa-large, OPT1.3B, LLaMa-3-3.2B models shows up to $3\times$ reduction in computation compared to the other ZO-based techniques, while retaining the memory and communication benefits over first-order federated learning techniques.