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) 2026-06-16

Automating Low-Risk Code Review at Meta: RADAR, Risk Calibration, and Review Efficiency

arXiv:2605.30208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-assisted coding tools have altered software production. At Meta, significant lines of code per human-landed diff grew by 105.9% year over year and per-developer diff volume rose 51%, with agentic AI responsible for over 80% of that growth. Meanwhile, the share of diffs receiving timely review has declined, exposing a widening gap between code supply and reviewer bandwidth. We ask three questions that progress from feasibility through calibration to impact: (1) can risk-stratified automation operate at scale across diverse organizations, (2) how does tuning the risk threshold affect the trade-off between automation yield and safety, and (3) to what extent does automated review reduce end-to-end latency for AI-generated changes? We deployed RADAR (Risk Aware Diff Auto Review), a multi-stage funnel that classifies each diff by authorship and source type, applies eligibility gates, static heuristics, a machine-learned Diff Risk Score, LLM-based Automated Code Review, and deterministic validation before landing qualifying changes. We evaluate RADAR through telemetry covering 535K+ RADAR-reviewed diffs, observational before-after comparisons for policy changes, and difference-in-differences analysis of efficiency outcomes. RADAR has reviewed 535K+ diffs and landed 331K+. Relaxing the Diff Risk Score threshold from the 25th to the 50th percentile increased the approve rate to 60.31%. The revert rate for RADAR-reviewed diffs is 1/3 that of non-RADAR diffs, and the Production Incident rate is 1/50 that of non-RADAR diffs. RADAR reduces median time to close by over 330% and median diff review wall time by 35%. Risk-aware layered automation can materially reduce review bottlenecks created by AI-driven code growth without compromising production safety.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Concatenated Matrix SVD: Compression Bounds, Incremental Approximation, and Error-Constrained Clustering

arXiv:2601.11626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large collections of matrices arise throughout modern machine learning, signal processing, and scientific computing, where they are commonly compressed by concatenation followed by truncated singular value decomposition (SVD). This strategy enables parameter sharing and efficient reconstruction and has been widely adopted across domains ranging from multi-view learning and signal processing to neural network compression. However, it leaves a fundamental question unanswered: which matrices can be safely concatenated and compressed together under explicit reconstruction error constraints? Existing approaches rely on heuristic or architecture-specific grouping and provide no principled guarantees on the resulting SVD approximation error. In the present work, we introduce a theory-driven framework for compression-aware clustering of matrices under SVD compression constraints. Our analysis establishes new spectral bounds for horizontally concatenated matrices, deriving global upper bounds on the optimal rank-$r$ SVD reconstruction error from lower bounds on singular value growth. The first bound follows from Weyl-type monotonicity under blockwise extensions, while the second leverages singular values of incremental residuals to yield tighter, per-block guarantees. We further develop an efficient approximate estimator based on incremental truncated SVD that tracks dominant singular values without forming the full concatenated matrix. Therefore, we propose three clustering algorithms that merge matrices only when their predicted joint SVD compression error remains below a user-specified threshold. The algorithms span a trade-off between speed, provable accuracy, and scalability, enabling compression-aware clustering with explicit error control.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

ChatPlanner: A Large Language Model Framework for Personalized Public Transit Routing

arXiv:2606.15315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized public transit routing in public transit systems remains challenging due to the difficulty of capturing and integrating diverse user preferences into routing algorithms. This paper presents ChatPlanner, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable preference aware public transit routing. Our approach employs fine-tuned LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to extract routing parameters and interpret nuanced user preferences from natural language queries, subsequently integrating these preferences into the objective function of a public transit routing algorithm. This study designs preference aware datasets incorporating eight personas and five contexts to establish scoring standards for both fine-tuning and RAG. This work conducted three experiments to validate the solutions' feasibility, extraction of routing information and preferences, and solution set quality and completeness. Results demonstrate that ChatPlanner generates feasible solutions reliably. Fine-tuning enforces the required output structure and learns general preference patterns, while RAG provides query-specific context to resolve imprecise or conversational expressions and calibrate continuous scores. The combination of both achieves the highest accuracy in routing information extraction and user preference interpretation. Results based on selected case studies show that by capturing user preferences, ChatPlanner identifies valuable solutions across different dimensions that existing route planners overlook, generating more valuable route alternatives. This research establishes a new paradigm for integrating natural language understanding into transportation optimization.

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

Revisiting Structural Dependency in Autoregressive Multi-Task Table Recognition via Order-Independent Cell-Level Representations

Multi-task table recognition jointly addresses table structure prediction, cell localization, and cell content recognition within a unified framework. Existing approaches often rely on autoregressive decoders to generate table structures and reuse their hidden states for cell localization and content recognition. This autoregressive generation process can make cell representations order-dependent, degrading global consistency across cells. This paper proposes a structural refinement module that produces order-independent cell features through non-causal attention. This design enables parallel inference of cell contents while conditioning each cell on global context encoded in the refined features. Experiments on two large datasets demonstrate consistent gains in cell localization and end-to-end recognition, while reducing overall inference time by around threefold.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Attractive and Repulsive Pattern Control in Sequence Generation

arXiv:2606.24911v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variable-order Markov models preserve local symbolic syntax by adapting context length, but long continuations can enter recurring high-order "tunnels": repeated suffixes, locally periodic passages, or copied fragments longer than the formal Markov order. This paper introduces signed pattern control for variable-order Markov generation with BP-Regular sampling. A weighted recurrence automaton computes an activation R for a chosen family of target patterns, and belief propagation samples exactly from P_beta(x) proportional to P_0(x) exp(beta R(x)). Negative coupling makes the target patterns costly during sampling; positive coupling rewards the same patterns and turns them into controlled attractors. The target family may be mined online from overactive generated material, supplied by a score or style vocabulary, or designed as an experimental probe. The main experiments use the online homeostatic case, choosing patterns that become overactive in the sampling history. On six duration-bearing monophonic sources, including Bach and Telemann material, the negative branch reduces generated 8-gram self-reuse, increases the effective number of generated 8-grams, and increases coverage of training-supported 4-gram contexts while preserving substantial lower-order support. A pitch-sequence replication on five Weimar Jazz Database solos gives the same anti-reuse signature outside Baroque material. The same signed mechanism also provides a positive branch for probing attractor basins, phase transitions, and hysteresis in the underlying variable-order model.

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

SDVDiag: Multimodal Causal Discovery for Online Diagnosis in Software-defined Vehicles

arXiv:2606.15559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The transition toward software-defined vehicles concentrates an increasing share of vehicle functionality into distributed software services, where failures propagate through service dependencies and the surface symptom is often several causal hops away from the underlying defect. Existing approaches to causal root-cause analysis in such systems address this only partially: they typically reason over a single observability modality and operate in an offline, operator-driven mode that does not match the demands of continuous vehicle operation. This paper presents SDVDiag, a multimodal causal-discovery pipeline that fuses log-based and metric-based service representations into a shared embedding space before graph construction, coupled with an anomaly-driven trigger that converts the diagnostic platform from a manually operated batch tool into a continuously running online system. Evaluation on an Autonomous Valet Parking testbed shows that the multimodal pipeline produces sparser causal graphs than a metrics-only baseline (134 vs. 182 edges on average) and consistently outperforms it in edge-weighted reward against an expert knowledge graph at every stage of human-feedback refinement, showing a 2.4-fold improvement over the baseline after 60 feedback queries. An end-to-end fault-injection scenario further demonstrates that the integrated trigger correctly recovers a true root cause located two causal hops upstream of the observable symptom.

07.
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.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Convergence to the Brownian CRT for critical branching Markov processe

arXiv:2601.05906v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove an invariance principle for a general class of continuous time critical branching processes with finite variance (non-local) branching mechanism. We show that the genealogical trees, viewed as random compact metric measure spaces, converge under rescaling to the Brownian continuum random tree in the Gromov-Hausdorff-weak topology, establishing a universal scaling limit for critical finite variance branching processes.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Structured Inference with Large Language Gibbs

The knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs) can serve as a substrate for structured reasoning over variables describing a complex world, but accessing this knowledge in a probabilistically coherent manner poses a difficult inference problem. We propose Large Language Gibbs, a scheme for structured probabilistic inference that uses conditional distributions of an LLM as transition operators. Rather than sampling structured objects through single-pass autoregressive generation, we iteratively resample individual variables conditioned on others using an LLM's next-token conditionals. This approach avoids order-dependent biases and produces a stationary distribution that reflects a compromise between all local conditionals. We apply this approach to sampling from synthetic distributions, consistent reasoning tasks, and Bayesian structure learning. The results suggest that the use of LLM conditionals in MCMC is a practical alternative to one-pass generation for structured probabilistic inference under a world prior accessible through noisy LLM conditionals.

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

Sinkhorn-CPD: Robust point cloud registration via unbalanced entropic optimal transport

Coherent Point Drift (CPD) is widely used for rigid point cloud registration because of its soft correspondences and closed-form parameter updates. However, CPD's target-side marginal constraint forces every observation, including outliers, to receive exactly unit probability mass. This assumption degrades registration accuracy under heavy outliers and partial overlap. Optimal transport (OT) methods can handle missing mass through unbalanced formulations, but require hand-tuned annealing schedules. In this paper, we propose Sinkhorn-CPD, which replaces CPD's target-side marginal constraint with dual Kullback-Leibler penalties, allowing the algorithm to discard outliers on both sides. The resulting formulation is a fully unbalanced entropic optimal transport problem, which can be efficiently solved by generalized Sinkhorn iterations. Moreover, Sinkhorn-CPD preserves the closed-form Procrustes and variance updates of CPD. In our method, the variance sigma^2 plays the role of the entropic regularization parameter, which induces an automatic annealing schedule from diffuse to sharp correspondences without manual temperature tuning. Experiments on synthetic, cross-category, and scan-to-CAD benchmarks show that Sinkhorn-CPD achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, with strong robustness to outliers and partial overlap.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

OpenThoughts-Agent: Data Recipes for Agentic Models

arXiv:2606.24855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic language models dramatically expand the applications of AI yet little is publicly known about how to curate training data for broadly capable agents. Existing open efforts such as SWE-Smith, SERA, and Nemotron-Terminal typically target a single benchmark, leaving open the question of how to train models that generalize across diverse agentic tasks. The OpenThoughts-Agent (OT-Agent) project addresses this gap with a fully open data curation pipeline for training agentic models. We conduct more than 100 controlled ablation experiments to systematically investigate each stage of the pipeline, yielding insights on the importance of task sources and diversity. We then assemble a training set of 100K examples from our pipeline and fine-tune Qwen3-32B on this dataset, which yields an average accuracy of 44.8% across seven agentic benchmarks and a 3.9 percentage point improvement over the strongest existing open data agentic model (Nemotron-Terminal-32B, 40.9%). Moreover, our training data exhibits strong scaling properties, outperforming alternative open datasets at every training set size in compute-controlled comparisons. We publicly release our training sets, data pipeline, experimental data, and models at openthoughts.ai to support future open research on agentic model training.

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

Minimalist Preprocessing Approach for Image Synthesis Detection

Generative models have significantly advanced image generation, resulting in synthesized images that are increasingly indistinguishable from authentic ones. However, the creation of fake images with malicious intent is a growing concern. Low-configured smart devices have become highly popular, making it easier for deceptive images to reach users. Consequently, the demand for effective detection methods is increasingly urgent. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet efficient method that captures pixel fluctuations between neighboring pixels by calculating the gradient, which highlights variations in grayscale intensity. This approach functions as a high-pass filter, emphasizing key features for accurate image distinction while minimizing color influence. Our experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method achieves accuracy levels comparable to state-of-the-art techniques while requiring minimal computational resources. Therefore, it is suitable for deployment on low-end devices such as smartphones. The code is available at https://github.com/vohoaidanh/adof.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SAMA: Semantic Anchor-aligned Augmentation for Unified Low-Resource Multimodal Information Extraction

Multimodal Information Extraction (MIE)-covering tasks such as Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER), Relation Extraction (MRE), and Event Extraction (MEE)-is essential for understanding multimedia content but remains constrained by severe data scarcity. Although data augmentation is a promising remedy, existing approaches are impeded by coarse cross-modal alignment and fragmented, task-specific designs that fail to exploit shared semantic knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Semantic Anchor-aligned Multimodal Augmentation (SAMA), a unified framework for generating high-fidelity, task-aware synthetic data. SAMA constructs structured semantic anchors from ground-truth labels to guide a Collaborative Multi-Experts Multimodal Large Language Model (CME-MLLM), which integrates a Universal Adapter for shared semantics with Task-Specific Adapters to produce diverse yet constraint-compliant textual samples. For image synthesis, SAMA employs an Anchor-Preserving Diffusion mechanism that uses anchor-weighted prompts and latent conditioning to maintain critical semantic anchors while diversifying visual contexts. To eliminate the need for manual verification, SAMA further introduces a Dual-Constraint Filtering module that selects synthetic samples based on both cross-modal consistency and anchor fidelity. Extensive experiments across benchmark datasets for MNER, MRE, and MEE demonstrate that SAMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art augmentation baselines under both fully supervised and low-resource settings, underscoring its versatility, robustness, and effectiveness.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Enhanced Low-Density Region Exploration in Classifier-Guided Diffusion Models Through Modified Reverse Diffusion Sampling

arXiv:2606.13347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as state-of-the-art generative models for high-fidelity image synthesis, particularly in their classifier-free guided and classifier-guided forms. However, standard classifier guidance concentrates probability mass around high-density class mean, leading to poor coverage of rare samples in the tails of the class-conditional distributions. Recent work on diffusion-based tail sampling mitigates this by training an additional low-density-seeking classifier with a synthetic-vs-real discriminator, at the cost of additional networks and training. In parallel, a number of samplers and distillation techniques accelerate or refine diffusion sampling, but do not explicitly address long-tail coverage. We propose a purely sampling-time, density-aware extension of classifier-guided conditional diffusion model that targets low-density regions without any additional training. We have applied guidance at noisy images not on predicted noise like most diffusion models. Starting from a pretrained conditional diffusion model and classifier on ImageNet, we modify the guided reverse dynamics by steering trajectories toward low-confidence regions via the modified classifier gradient, and at each time step, we also guide the sampling process toward the predicted real image. 1st guidance helps explore low-probability samples, and 2nd guidance helps to generate samples to be close to the real data manifold. The proposed sampler consistently improves ADM model recall at 64x64 resolution while maintaining a comparable FID, and with a 256x256 ADM model, we showed the results visually with different combinations of both guidance. We also showed that standard ADM classifier guidance, combined with predicted real image guidance, helps generate high perceptual quality samples with a 256x256 ADM model on ImageNet.

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

MapSatisfyBench: Benchmarking Satisfaction-Aware Map Agents through Behavior-Grounded Implicit Decision Factors

arXiv:2606.17453v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents are increasingly integrated into map services. Since map services are embedded in everyday-life scenarios rather than professional task settings, users often express their needs informally, resulting in underspecified queries with many unspoken needs, namely, implicit decision factors that are critical for user satisfaction. Although clarification is an effective way to mitigate this issue, it increases user burden in daily interaction, and a capable agent should first proactively recover such factors from available information sources. However, evaluating this ability is challenging. The first challenge is to determine which implicit decision factors are suitable for evaluation. A factor is evaluable only if it affects user acceptance and can be recovered from information available to the agent before it responds. Second, user satisfaction cannot be reliably represented by a single reference answer, requiring a benchmark that converts satisfaction-relevant factors into objective and quantifiable evaluation targets. To address these challenges, we propose a restore-identify-filter framework that reconstructs complete user needs from behavior-chain evidence, identifies implicit decision factors, and retains only those supported by pre-query evidence. Building on this methodology, we construct MapSatisfyBench from large-scale, real-world anonymized user data and annotate ground truth from five dimensions and enables full-chain evaluation of satisfaction-aware map agents. Experiments show that current agents generally perform well on explicit task completion, but remain limited in satisfying implicit decision factors and proactively acquiring the evidence needed for satisfaction-aware decisions. These findings establish MapSatisfyBench as a benchmark for shifting map-agent evaluation from task completion toward satisfaction-aware spatial decision making.

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

SkillHone: A Harness for Continual Agent Skill Evolution Through Persistent Decision History

arXiv:2606.08671v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent skills extend language-model agents with task-specific procedures, scripts, and references, but the tasks and environments they target continually change. Existing methods improve skills in bounded runs and retain only the final artifact, discarding the decision history that later agents need to interpret prior revisions, evaluations, and rejected alternatives. We introduce SkillHone, a harness for continual agent skill evolution grounded in persistent decision history. SkillHone pairs skill revisions with evaluation-side evidence that supplies practice feedback, recording structured histories of diagnoses, revisions, evidence, and outcomes. Role-separated subagents run candidate skills on practice probes with redacted reporting and propose revisions informed by prior decisions, enabling cross-session refinement without rediscovering past rationale. On deep-research benchmarks, SkillHone runs without a pre-integrated search stack and outperforms the commercially backed deep-research agent by 15.8 points on GAIA and 3.2 points on WebWalkerQA-EN, while also exceeding prior skill-evolution methods. We further deploy SkillHone on internal tool-mediated analysis scenarios, where it improves accuracy by an average of 18.8 points across seven settings.

17.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

TCRBinder: Unified pre-trained language model with paired-chain synergy for predicting T-cell receptor binding specificity

作者:

by Weihe Dong, Qiang Yang, Long Xu, Xiaokun Li, Kuanquan Wang, Suyu Dong, Gongning Luo, Xianyu Zhang, Tiansong Yang, Xin Gao, Guohua Wang Deciphering how human T cells recognise peptide-HLA (pHLA) complexes underpins next-generation vaccines and personalised immunotherapies, yet extreme sequence diversity and paired-chains interdependence still hamper reliable in silico prediction of T-cell receptor (TCR) specificity. To overcome these hurdles, we built TCRBinder, a paired-chain-aware deep model with a multi-branch encoder that routes each molecular component through dedicated transformer-based modules to capture contextual signals in both HLA pseudo-sequences and antigenic peptides while simultaneously processing the TCR α and β chains. This design captures the synergistic interaction between paired chains to emulate peptide-HLA-TCR (PHT) interactions and expose residue-level contact motifs. Across PHT and peptide-TCR (pTCR) benchmarks, the model delivered state-of-the-art performance (AUC-ROC = 0.911, AUPR = 0.791 for the PHT task) and remained superior on multiple independent datasets. We tracked the dynamics of clonal expansion and, in a large SARS-CoV-2 repertoire containing completely unseen peptides, improved the AUC-ROC by up to 16.3% over the leading alternatives. Moreover, TCRBinder provided mechanistic insights by pinpointing contact hotspots and quantifying residue contributions to binding probability. These capabilities position TCRBinder as a versatile tool for rational antigen discovery, immunotherapy stratification, and neoantigen vaccine design.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

FlowRAG: Synergizing Explicit Reasoning via Frequency-Aware Multi-Granularity Graph Flow

arXiv:2606.17856v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) is effective for knowledge-intensive and multi-hop query tasks; however, many existing methods primarily seed entity-based graphs and rely on implicit semantic relevance propagation. This often (i) under-retrieves when user queries are abstract and semantically sparse at the entity level, and (ii) suffers from brittle multi-hop reasoning, where noisy activations can derail entity-to-entity transitions and corrupt the inferred relation chain, yielding unreliable conclusions. To this end, we propose \texttt{FlowRAG}, a semantic-aware retrieval framework that improves both semantic recall and explicit reasoning. Specifically, \texttt{FlowRAG} constructs a quad-level heterogeneous graph over passages, summaries, sentences, and entities, where summary nodes serve as a coarse semantic hub. At retrieval time, a dual-granularity activation module combines summary–query alignment with sentence-level matching to activate relevant entities under paraphrase and abstraction robustly. We then introduce a frequency-aware weighted flow module that routes relevance through entity–passage links weighted by within-passage term frequency, pruning noisy connections and extracting high-confidence reasoning paths as an explicit logic skeleton for generation. Extensive experiments show that \texttt{FlowRAG} obtains state-of-the-art performance on complex reasoning benchmarks.

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

Teaching Diffusion to Speculate Left-to-Right

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation. Speculative decoding addresses this bottleneck by employing a lightweight draft model to propose multiple future tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model. Recent work has demonstrated that diffusion language models are well suited for this setting, as they can generate entire blocks of draft tokens in parallel and thereby alleviate the sequential constraints of autoregressive drafting. A subtlety of this regime is that block-diffusion drafters generate tokens bidirectionally within a block, whereas verification is performed by an autoregressive target model that evaluates tokens in a strictly left-to-right manner, leaving a gap between the symmetric training-time objective and the asymmetric verification-time reward. In this work, we offer an empirical analysis of three training-time interventions that narrow this gap: token positional weighting, a first-error focal loss that targets the position that breaks the accepted prefix within each block, and a chain loss term that substitutes a differentiable surrogate for the expected accepted length. The three interventions act along orthogonal axes (position, block-conditional first error, joint prefix) and compose additively; they are likewise orthogonal to test-time alignment mechanisms such as multi-draft self-selection, with which they can in principle be combined. Across four target models and six reasoning, code, and dialogue benchmarks, the three interventions raise accepted draft length by 21-76% per benchmark over a position-uniform baseline, without adding additional forward passes and without changing the inference pipeline or the rejection-sampling exactness contract.

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

Spectral Retrieval-Augmented Time-Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting leverages historical patterns to predict future values, but traditional methods face challenges when dealing with complex, non-stationary patterns that are difficult to memorize during training. Retrieval-augmented approaches have emerged as promising solutions by retrieving similar historical patterns to enhance predictions. However, existing retrieval methods suffer from two fundamental limitations: spectral blindness, which overlooks critical frequency-domain characteristics that capture underlying periodic structures, and temporal recency, which treats all historical data equally without emphasizing recent, more relevant patterns. In this paper, we propose SpecReTF, a novel retrieval method that addresses these issues by converting time series into windowed frequency representations, measuring similarity with a combined metric that captures both amplitude and phase information. To balance recency and historical context, we apply an exponential moving average weighting scheme that emphasizes recent windows. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SpecReTF outperforms time-domain retrieval methods, achieving superior forecasting accuracy across diverse, non-stationary time series.

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

Best Arm Identification with Minimal Regret

arXiv:2409.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly amalgamates two of its most ubiquitous objectives: regret minimization and BAI. More precisely, the agent's goal is to identify the best arm with a prescribed confidence level $\delta$, while minimizing the cumulative regret up to the stopping time. Focusing on single-parameter exponential families of distributions, we leverage information-theoretic techniques to establish an instance-dependent lower bound on the expected cumulative regret. Moreover, we present an impossibility result that underscores the tension between cumulative regret and sample complexity in fixed-confidence BAI. Complementarily, we design and analyze the Double KL-UCB algorithm, which achieves asymptotic optimality as the confidence level tends to zero. Notably, this algorithm employs two distinct confidence bounds to guide arm selection in a randomized manner. Our findings elucidate a fresh perspective on the inherent connections between regret minimization and BAI.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Europe as science superpower: what it will take to rival the US and China

Amid chaos in US science and geopolitical turmoil, Europe wants to position itself as a research haven — but questions about funding and innovation remain. Amid chaos in US science and geopolitical turmoil, Europe wants to position itself as a research haven — but questions about funding and innovation remain.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Fully Differentiable Neural Forced Alignment via Soft Dynamic Programming

Recent advances in sequence modeling have significantly improved ASR systems, bringing them close to human-level recognition accuracy and enhancing robustness across diverse acoustic conditions and languages. In contrast, Forced Alignment has not experienced comparable progress, and traditional HMM-GMM frameworks remain widely adopted and highly competitive. To address this gap, we propose an end-to-end, fully differentiable neural architecture specifically designed for phoneme alignment. The model consists of an encoder that processes the input signal and a decoder that produces alignment decisions. The encoder is structured into two complementary branches: one dedicated to phoneme identity verification and the other to phoneme boundary detection. The decoder is implemented as a trainable module based on differentiable soft dynamic programming. The entire system is optimized end-to-end using a novel contrastive loss that encourages clear separation between steady-state phoneme regions and transition boundaries. The proposed approach outperforms the current state of the art in phoneme alignment on hand-annotated English benchmarks, achieves strong word-level generalization results, and demonstrates generalization on unseen languages.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Decoupling local classicality from classical explainability: A noncontextual model for bilocal classical theory and a locally-classical but contextual theory

arXiv:2511.19266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct an ontological model for the theory known as bilocal classical theory doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216. To our knowledge, this is only the second time that an ontological model has been constructed for an entire theory, rather than just for some particular scenarios within a theory. This result refutes a conjecture from doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216 which suggested that there might be no local-realist ontological model for bilocal classical theory. Moreover, it is the first time that an ontological model has been constructed for a theory that fails to be locally tomographic, showing that the assumption of local tomography underpinning the structure theorem in doi.org/10.22331/q-2024-03-14-1283 is a genuine limitation of the theorem. This demonstrates that in general there is no tension between failures of local tomography and classical explainability (i.e., generalised noncontextuality). In fact, bilocal classical theory is in many ways more simply understood via the underlying ontological model than it is within its original formulation (much as how odd-dimensional stabiliser subtheories can be more simply understood via Spekkens' toy theory). Furthermore, this result naturally leads to the question, does every locally-classical theory admit of an ontological model? By constructing a concrete counterexample, we show that this is not the case. Our findings demonstrate that there is no straightforward relationship between theories being locally-classical, and them being classically-explainable. This shows that the fundamental status of compositional properties (such as local tomography) is not a technical side-issue, but a central and unavoidable question for a coherent understanding even of classicality itself.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Meta Flow Maps enable scalable reward alignment

arXiv:2601.14430v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling generative models is computationally expensive. This is because optimal alignment with a reward function–whether via inference-time steering or fine-tuning–requires estimating the value function. This task demands access to the conditional posterior $p_{1|t}(x_1|x_t)$, the distribution of clean data $x_1$ consistent with an intermediate state $x_t$, a requirement that typically compels methods to resort to costly trajectory simulations. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Meta Flow Maps (MFMs), a framework extending consistency models and flow maps into the stochastic regime. MFMs are trained to perform stochastic one-step posterior sampling, generating arbitrarily many i.i.d. draws of clean data $x_1$ from any intermediate state. Crucially, these samples provide a differentiable reparametrization that unlocks efficient value function estimation. We leverage this capability to solve bottlenecks in both paradigms: enabling inference-time steering without inner rollouts, and facilitating unbiased, off-policy fine-tuning to general rewards. Empirically, our single-particle steered-MFM sampler outperforms a Best-of-1000 baseline on ImageNet across multiple rewards at a fraction of the compute.