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.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Development of iADJUST: a theory-informed, patient co-designed digital psychological intervention for adjustment in chronic kidney disease

Background: Psychological distress is common in chronic kidney disease (CKD) and is associated with reduced quality of life, treatment non-adherence, and worse clinical outcomes. Distress in CKD is also linked to difficulties adjusting to the demands of illness management. Despite this, psychological support remains inconsistently integrated within kidney care pathways, and existing interventions often lack clear theoretical specification and explicit targeting of mechanisms underpinning adjustment to CKD. Objectives: To describe the systematic development of iADJUST, a theory-informed patient co-designed digital psychological intervention targeting key cognitive and behavioural mechanisms involved in adjustment to CKD. Methods: Intervention development was guided by the Medical Research Council framework for complex interventions. A structured, iterative process integrated empirical evidence, psychological theory, and patient and public involvement and engagement. The Common-Sense Model of Self-Regulation and cognitive behavioural theories informed the identification of modifiable maintaining mechanisms associated with adjustment to CKD. Intervention components were mapped onto these mechanisms and refined through co-design with people living with CKD. Results: iADJUST is a six-session self-guided digital psychological intervention delivered over 12 weeks and supplemented by therapist contact. The intervention targets illness-related uncertainty, fatigue-related activity dysregulation, catastrophic what-if thinking, self-critical evaluation, and behavioural withdrawal. It integrates psychoeducation, cognitive and behavioural strategies, maintenance planning, and elements from acceptance and commitment therapy and compassion-focused approaches. Content is delivered through video, audio, and guided tasks and activities. Conclusion: iADJUST provides a theory-informed, evidence-based psychological intervention for CKD explicitly mapping intervention components to maintaining cognitive and behavioural mechanisms implicated in adjustment. Feasibility evaluation is underway.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Unsupervised Diffusion Solver for Combinatorial Optimization via Combinatorial Adjoint Matching

arXiv:2605.30920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based neural solvers have shown strong promise for combinatorial optimization (CO), but existing methods typically rely on supervised training with large collections of near-optimal solutions. In this work, we extend adjoint-based trajectory optimization methods to discrete combinatorial domains. We formulate diffusion-based CO as a stochastic control problem over Continuous-Time Markov Chains and introduce discrete adjoint dynamics for propagating optimization signals through discrete generative trajectories. Building on this formulation, we propose Combinatorial Adjoint Matching (CAM), an unsupervised training framework for discrete diffusion solvers with structured and low-variance trajectory-level optimization signals. Empirically, CAM consistently outperforms existing unsupervised diffusion baselines and achieves performance competitive with strong supervised diffusion solvers and even traditional solvers across diverse combinatorial optimization problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/Shengyu-Feng/CAM.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Looked but didn't see: inattentional blindness and yes-bias confabulation in vision-language models

Previous work showed that many participants fail to notice a gorilla in a video of people playing basketball. Another study found that 83% of trained radiologists failed to report a gorilla figure inserted into a chest CT nodule-search task, even though eye-tracking revealed that most observers had foveated the figure. We ask whether a similar phenomenon exists in contemporary vision-language models (VLMs). We find that (i) VLMs are capable of spotting the gorilla in both still-frame images and videos of lung CT scans; (ii) models display inattentional blindness, which varies according to model generation and type of stimulus presented; (iii) Gemini-3.1-Pro outperforms most other flagship and open-weight VLMs at identifying the presence or absence of the gorilla. We additionally ran a segmentation experiment utilizing two different model classes: a generalist (SAM 3), which found the gorilla but produced little to no results for anatomy-based prompts; a medical specialist (BiomedParse), which produced more promising anatomy-based results but flagged "gorilla" on gorilla-free control videos on 82% of frames. The behavioral signature of inattentional blindness reproduces in VLMs, but a unique confabulation failure mode means that any "did the model see X" claim requires signal-detection analysis with a matched-control false-alarm baseline.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Schützen: Evaluating LLM Safety in Bulgarian and German Contexts

Large language models are increasingly deployed across professional domains, bringing hard-to-predict risks, including the generation of harmful or disrespectful content. Although substantial progress has been made in developing safety evaluation datasets, existing resources remain overwhelmingly English- and Chinese-centric. This limitation is particularly pronounced when evaluating languages that operate within shared sociocultural, legal, and ethical contexts. To address this gap, we introduce Sch\"{u}tzen: a German–Bulgarian safety dataset designed to assess model answerability under risk, covering both a low-resource language (Bulgarian) and a high-resource language (German). Experiments with multilingual and language-specific LLMs reveal pronounced cross-language differences in safety behavior, highlighting the necessity of tailored, region-specific evaluation resources to support the responsible deployment of LLMs in Germany and Bulgaria. Datasets and code are available at https://github.com/xnlp-lab/Schutzen. Warning: this paper contains examples that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Fantastic Scientific Agents and How to Build Them: AgentBuild for Rietveld Refinement

arXiv:2606.12834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As scientific workflows shift from deterministic executables to LLM-based agents, the development practices on offer, such as fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and prompt-and-go, bury the scientist's judgment. We propose treating agent construction as a workflow stage and introduce AgentBuild, which builds a scientific agent from a contract the scientist authors. The contract is a version-controlled rubric, a difficulty-graded curriculum, and a curated external knowledge base. A rubric-driven judge gates a meta-optimizer coding agent that edits the agent within a declared boundary, so the build compiles the agent, not the scientist's judgment. We instantiate this for Rietveld refinement of X-ray diffraction data through GSAS-II behind MCP and A2A, where a blank-harness construction run progresses through a lithium lanthanum zirconium oxide (LLZO) signal-to-noise ladder, reaches the 4 hour scan as a frontier case, and exposes the workflow-scope limits that remain. The same rubric that rewards credible fits also scores trajectory scope, making the frontier a contract failure rather than a pattern-fitting failure. As base models evolve, re-running AgentBuild is a re-tune, not a rebuild, and the scientist's authored contract remains the durable asset.

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

A Tool for the Synthesis of Adaptive Probabilistic Processors Based on the Ising Model

arXiv:2606.19533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a tool for the synthesis and simulation of probabilistic architectures for solving combinatorial optimization problems by mapping them to the Ising model. The proposed approach automatically constructs the Ising Hamiltonian and determines the number of probabilistic elements (p-bits) based on problem characteristics such as size and topology. Furthermore, the tool introduces an adaptive strategy for selecting the most suitable update algorithm among Gibbs Sampling, Simulated Annealing (SA), Simulated Quantum Annealing (SQA), and cluster-based methods. Experimental results using benchmark problems demonstrate improved convergence behavior and flexibility compared to fixed approaches. The proposed framework enables systematic evaluation of probabilistic computing strategies and supports the development of future hardware implementations based on MTJs and p-bits.

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

Can Artificial Intelligence Accelerate Technological Progress? Researchers' Perspectives on AI in Manufacturing and Materials Science

arXiv:2511.14007v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) raises expectations of substantial increases in rates of technological progress, but such anticipations are often not connected to detailed ground-level studies of AI use in innovation processes. Accordingly, it remains unclear how and to what extent AI can accelerate innovation. To help to fill this gap, we explore and assess results from 32 interviews with U.S.-based academic manufacturing and materials sciences researchers experienced with AI and machine learning (ML) techniques. We found that AI was primarily used for modeling of materials and manufacturing processes, facilitating cheaper and more rapid search of design spaces for materials and manufacturing processes alike. Benefits included cost, time, and computation savings in technology development. However, AI/ML tools were unreliable outside design spaces for which dense data were already available; they required skilled and judicious application in tandem with older research techniques; and concerns were raised about the potential to detrimentally circumvent opportunities for disruptive theoretical advancement. Based on these results, we suggest there is reason for optimism about acceleration in sustaining innovations through the use of AI/ML; but that support for conventional empirical, computational, and theoretical research is required to maintain the likelihood of further disruptive advances in manufacturing and materials.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

The ASE-LSE Disagreement Landscape: An End-to-End Characterisation of Extremes and Structural Drivers

arXiv:2605.22346v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Two of the most widely used methods for analysing graph data, Adjacency Spectral Embedding and Laplacian Spectral Embedding, often produce different results when applied to the same graph. Yet the structural reasons behind this disagreement remain incompletely understood. This paper provides an end-to-end account of ASE-LSE latent subspace disagreement. We first prove that the two methods produce identical latent subspaces for every embedding dimension whenever the Laplacian is a scalar multiple of the adjacency matrix, and show that this scalar relationship holds if and only if the graph is either regular or bipartite biregular. This anchor result identifies a sufficient condition for perfect agreement that pins down the floor of the disagreement spectrum and supplies the baseline for the perturbation analysis. We then prove that no maximal-disagreement graph or family of graphs exists: the disagreement is always strictly below its theoretical ceiling, and we exhibit a witness family demonstrating that no finite maximum is attainable, so the disagreement landscape has no maximiser. With both endpoints established, we derive a Regularity Departure Bound whose two terms isolate degree heterogeneity and eigengap as the primary structural factors influencing disagreement in the middle regime. Empirical validation across thousands of simulated graphs confirms the mechanisms predicted by the bound: heterogeneity pushes disagreement up, eigengap suppresses it, and their joint ratio emerges as a unified predictor of ASE-LSE disagreement, suggesting when the two embeddings can be treated as interchangeable and when they cannot.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Temporal Self-Imitation Learning

arXiv:2606.19752v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon robot manipulation policies trained with reward shaping can still exploit dense rewards through inefficient interaction, while rare efficient behaviors may be forgotten during training. We argue that temporal efficiency itself provides a powerful and underutilized source of self-supervision for reinforcement learning. We introduce Temporal Self-Imitation Learning (TSIL), a reinforcement learning framework that mines temporally efficient successful trajectories generated during learning and converts them into reusable supervision for future policy improvement. TSIL progressively refines learning using configuration-conditioned adaptive temporal targets derived from fast successful trajectories, while preserving and replaying efficient behaviors through efficiency-weighted self-imitation learning. Across 15 distinct long-horizon manipulation tasks, TSIL consistently improves learning efficiency, task-completion efficiency, revisitation of fast successful behaviors, and robustness to unstable training conditions. More broadly, our results suggest that the temporal structure of successful behavior itself provides a scalable self-supervisory signal for reinforcement learning beyond manually engineered reward shaping alone.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Language-Guided Abstraction for Visual Reasoning

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is viewed as a critical avenue to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), as it enables models to learn abstract transformation rules from few-shot examples and then generalize to new tasks. However, prevalent ARC methodology is either pure language or vision-only (i.e., VARC). The former depends heavily on LLMs, consuming billions of parameters. The latter often struggles to capture high-level semantics, leading to overfitting on pixel-level patterns. To bridge this gap, we propose L-VARC, a novel framework that enhances visual reasoning via a language-guided Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI) branch. Specifically, we design a Semantic Compression Module by feeding a unified, task-agnostic prompt into DeepSeek-V3. In this way, the raw LARC (a crowd-sourced language description dataset) can be substantially refined and structured, fitting with the context length constraint of standard text encoders (e.g., CLIP). Moreover, we design a Cross-Attention Projector to align visual features with semantic embeddings, aiming to guide the training of the ARC model. Notably, the LUPI branch is taken in the training process and will be discarded during inference, thereby yielding a lightweight model with a mere 18 million parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our L-VARC effectively leverages linguistic priors to boost visual reasoning and outperforms state-of-the-art. Ablation studies further confirm the contribution of the two new designs towards the L-VARC framework. The code is available at https://github.com/GZHU-DVL/L-VARC.

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

A Variational Framework for LLM Generator-Regulator Games

作者:

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

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MolE-RAG: Molecular Structure-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chemistry

arXiv:2606.05693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained. To bridge this semantic and chemical knowledge gap, we propose MolE-RAG, a training-free, molecule-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework for LLM-based molecular property prediction. MolE-RAG augments each prediction with three complementary sources of inference-time context: retrieved chemistry literature, molecule-specific information including compound synonyms, identifiers, functional group annotations, and physicochemical descriptors, and structurally similar molecules retrieved from the training set. We evaluate MolE-RAG across nine molecular property prediction tasks using proprietary, chemistry-specialized, and open-source LLMs. Across general-purpose LLMs, MolE-RAG improves ROC-AUC by up to 28 percentage points on classification tasks and reduces regression RMSE by up to 67% relative to a SMILES-only baseline. We further find that the utility of each context source varies across models and tasks, with different models benefiting most from textual retrieval, molecular context, or structural retrieval. These results suggest that molecule-centric retrieval can improve LLM-based molecular property prediction without model fine-tuning while providing a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous chemical knowledge at inference time.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Efficient time-series prediction on NISQ devices via time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine

arXiv:2602.21544v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We proposed a time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine (TD-QELM) for efficient time-series prediction on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. By encoding multiple past inputs simultaneously, TD-QELM achieves shallow circuit depth independent of sequence length, thereby, mitigating noise accumulation and reducing computational complexity. Experiments using the NARMA benchmark on both noiseless simulations and IBM's 127-qubit processor demonstrate that TD-QELM consistently outperforms conventional quantum reservoir computing in prediction accuracy and noise robustness. These results highlight TD-QELM as a practical and scalable framework for time-series learning on current NISQ hardware.

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

COSMOS: Model-Agnostic Personalized Federated Learning with Clustered Server Models and Pseudo-Label-Only Communication

arXiv:2605.11165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) in heterogeneous environments remains challenging because client models often differ in both architecture and data distribution. While recent approaches attempt to address this challenge through client clustering and knowledge distillation, simultaneously handling architectural and statistical heterogeneity remains difficult. We introduce COSMOS, a model-agnostic framework that enables server-side personalization using only pseudo-label communication. Clients train local models and predict on the public data; the server clusters clients by prediction similarity, trains a cluster-specific model for each group using its own compute, and distills the resulting models back to clients. We provide the first theoretical analysis showing that distillation from the learned cluster models can yield exponential personalization risk contraction, going beyond the convergence-to-stationarity guarantees typically provided in model-agnostic FL. Experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that COSMOS consistently outperforms all model-agnostic FL baselines while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art personalized FL methods. More broadly, our results highlight personalized server-side learning with pseudo-labels as a promising paradigm for scalable and model-agnostic federated learning in highly heterogeneous environments.

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

MinhwaNet: Faithful but Insufficient Object Grounding in Korean Folk Painting

Korean folk painting (minhwa) is built from a small vocabulary of auspicious symbols, a tiger for protection, a pair of birds for marital harmony, a peony for wealth, that recur across many of its painted genres. This suggests an obvious computational approach, identify which symbols appear in a painting and read the genre from the inventory. Working with a public corpus that pairs whole paintings, eight-field bilingual curatorial captions, and a separate set of expert object crops, we find that this approach does not work. A model given only a list of which symbols a painting contains predicts the genre far worse than a model that fuses the image with the curatorial text, and forcing the genre representation to be object-grounded actively hurts accuracy. The visual evidence on which the genre prediction rests is nonetheless localized and inspectable. A leakage-safe object evidence map projected from a part-level detector is spatially faithful to where curators isolated symbolic objects and to a patch-based surrogate's own gradient saliency. We name this configuration a faithful-but-insufficient dissociation. The part-level explanation is honest about what the part-level model sees, yet the genre target turns on how symbols are arranged rather than on which ones appear. The same lens separates a content label that survives transfer to held-out source institutions, genre, from a style label that does not, era, a prediction we confirm on two further labels in the corpus. We release the multimodal system, a worked-example reading of one painting's evidence map against its catalogue, and a set of evaluation cautions that recur in long-tailed heritage collections.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Vine Codes: Low-Overhead Quantum LDPC Codes on a Planar Square Grid

arXiv:2606.20263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The surface code is a promising route towards large-scale quantum computing, requiring only nearest-neighbour gates amenable to superconducting hardware. However, surface codes incur large qubit overheads. Novel quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) codes promise to reduce overheads but require long-range connections that are difficult to achieve on superconducting platforms. Here, we introduce "Vine Codes" - qLDPC codes that are implementable on a planar square grid through nearest-neighbour, two-qubit gates native to superconducting platforms (iSWAP and CZ). Our approach generalises "Directional Codes" recently introduced by Gehér et. al. (2025) which are constrained to a torus. In contrast, vine codes have open boundary conditions constructed with the aid of routing qubits. We perform extensive numeric searches and find promising candidate vine codes, e.g. [[121,4,6]], [[221,6,7]], and [[234,9,6]] codes. We verify the circuit distances and show that data and measure qubits required can be reduced by up to ~28% relative to the surface code at a circuit distance of 7. Even including routing qubits, vine codes require fewer total qubits than the surface code (e.g. ~18% reduction at circuit distance 10) and benefits are expected to increase at higher distances. We perform circuit-level noise simulations to demonstrate that under a realistic noise model and at a near-term noise rate of $10^{-3}$, vine codes can perform better than the surface code while using fewer qubits. We give an exhaustive list of all unique vine codes up to stabiliser-weight 9. We additionally introduce "Flip-Vine Codes" which possess single-qubit transversal Clifford gates useful for fault-tolerant logic and magic state cultivation. We furthermore construct examples of generalised open boundaries for vine codes that go beyond the familiar X/Z boundaries of the surface and tile codes.

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

ARVO: Atlas of Reproducible Vulnerabilities for Open-Source Software

arXiv:2606.17283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Achieving reproducibility, quantity, and diversity in vulnerability datasets has long been viewed as an inherent three-way trade-off, where improving one dimension often comes at the cost of the others. In practice, reproducibility has been the dimension most often neglected. This has limited what can be automatically extracted from historical bug datasets, and has reduced their utility for downstream security research. In this work, we propose a method to produce a new security dataset which ensures reproducibility for diverse vulnerabilities at scale by identifying the key obstacles to large-scale bug reproduction and addressing them with general solutions. Using this method, we introduce full reproducibility to the largest open source software vulnerability dataset (OSS-Fuzz) and construct the ARVO dataset (an Atlas of Reproducible Vulnerabilities in Open-source software). ARVO is a large-scale dataset consisting of over 6,100 real-world vulnerabilities across 311 projects. Focusing on reproducibility, ARVO differs from existing datasets by providing each vulnerability in a form that can be consistently rebuilt, triggered, and analyzed across versions. Reproducibility also enables automatic identification of the corresponding patch for each vulnerability and supports direct interaction with vulnerabilities after code changes, capabilities that existing large-scale datasets do not provide. In our evaluation, ARVO successfully reproduces 81% of vulnerabilities and achieves 89.4% accuracy on the located patches. We also discuss ARVO's influence on both upstream practices and downstream security research.

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

Taylor-Calibrate: Principled Initialization for Hybrid Linear Attention Distillation

Hybrid linear attention models offer an appealing path to faster long-context inference: they reduce the quadratic cost and KV-cache burden of full softmax attention while retaining much of the quality of Transformer models. A practical way to obtain such models is to convert a pretrained Transformer instead of pretraining a new architecture from scratch, but this conversion is still brittle. Simply copying the teacher attention projections into a Gated DeltaNet (GDN) student does not specify the new recurrent decay, write, and output-gating dynamics. As a result, the converted model often starts in a poor dynamical regime and must spend many distillation tokens repairing initialization rather than learning the remaining teacher behavior. We propose Taylor-Calibrate, a lightweight initialization method for hybrid GDN students. The method uses Taylor-guided teacher attention statistics to set the value projection, memory timescale, write gates, and output gate, then applies a short per-layer alignment step to match each converted layer to the teacher output. Across four teacher settings and three retained-layer policies, Taylor-Calibrate gives substantially stronger zero-shot students, with up to an 88x improvement in a representative ablation, and reaches matched recovery targets with 4.9x–9.2x fewer training tokens than naive conversion.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

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

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

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

A Survey on Federated Causal Discovery and Inference

arXiv:2606.23741v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal reasoning, which encompasses the discovery of causal structures and the inference of causal effects, is fundamental to data-driven decision making. In practice, data for reliable causal analysis are often distributed across institutions and cannot be centralized due to privacy regulations or communication constraints. Federated learning (FL) addresses this by enabling collaborative analysis without raw data sharing, giving rise to the rapidly growing field of federated causal discovery (FCD) and inference (FCI). However, the interdisciplinary nature of this field and the absence of a comprehensive survey present barriers to entry for researchers. This paper bridges that gap by providing a systematic review through multi-dimensional taxonomies. Grounded in the three core design decisions underlying any FCD solution, namely how structures are learned, how data are partitioned, and what structural knowledge each party obtains, we organize FCD along three axes: methodological paradigm, federation topology, and structural scope. We further examine key practical dimensions, including temporal dynamics, data heterogeneity, missing data, and non-identical variable sets. For FCI, we categorize methods by target estimand (average versus individualized/conditional treatment effects) and by estimation strategy, from classical weighting methods to modern deep generative architectures. Unlike prior works that treat FCD and FCI separately, we formalize their connection as complementary stages of a unified federated causal reasoning pipeline, where FCD supplies the structural knowledge required for valid effect estimation in FCI. Finally, we highlight their shared concerns regarding privacy, communication efficiency, theoretical guarantees, and application domains, and conclude by identifying open challenges for future research.

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

From Values to Tokens: An LLM-Driven Framework for Context-aware Time Series Forecasting via Symbolic Discretization

arXiv:2508.09191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time series forecasting plays a vital role in supporting decision-making across a wide range of critical applications, including energy, healthcare, and finance. Despite recent advances, forecasting accuracy remains limited due to the challenge of integrating historical numerical sequences with contextual features, which often comprise unstructured textual data. To address this challenge, we propose TokenCast, a large language model (LLM) driven framework that leverages language-based symbolic representations as a unified intermediary for context-aware time series forecasting. Specifically, TokenCast employs a discrete tokenizer to transform continuous numerical sequences into temporal tokens, enabling structural alignment with language-based inputs. To effectively bridge the semantic gap between modalities, both temporal and contextual tokens are embedded into a shared representation space via a pre-trained LLM, further optimized with generative objectives. Building upon this unified semantic space, the aligned LLM is subsequently fine-tuned in a supervised manner to predict future temporal tokens, which are then decoded back into the original numerical space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and highlight its potential as a generative framework for context-aware time series forecasting. The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/TokenCast.

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

Rel-Zero: Harnessing Patch-Pair Invariance for Robust Zero-Watermarking Against AI Editing

Recent advancements in diffusion-based image editing pose a significant threat to the authenticity of digital visual content. Traditional embedding-based watermarking methods often introduce perceptible perturbations to maintain robustness, inevitably compromising visual fidelity. Meanwhile, existing zero-watermarking approaches, typically relying on global image features, struggle to withstand sophisticated manipulations. In this work, we uncover a key observation: while individual image patches undergo substantial alterations during AI-based editing, the relational distance between patch pairs remains relatively invariant. Leveraging this property, we propose Relational Zero-Watermarking (Rel-Zero), a novel framework that requires no modification to the original image but derives a unique zero-watermark from these editing-invariant patch relations. By grounding the watermark in intrinsic structural consistency rather than absolute appearance, Rel-Zero provides a non-invasive yet resilient mechanism for content authentication. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Rel-Zero achieves substantially improved robustness across diverse editing models and manipulations compared to prior zero-watermarking approaches.

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

The African Language Tax: Quantifying the Cost, Latency, and Context Penalty of Tokenizing African Languages in Frontier LLMs

Commercial large language models bill, scale latency, and budget context per token. Yet tokenizers assign more subword tokens to the same meaning in some languages than in others, so speakers of languages with high token-fertility pay a structural penalty before a model is ever invoked. This penalty is documented for multilingual settings in general, but it has not been measured systematically for African languages at the level of enterprise deployment economics and cognitive context capacity. We measure it across 20 African languages spanning five language families and three scripts (Latin, Ge'ez/Ethiopic, N'Ko; 19 appear in the primary FLORES-200+ corpus, with Nigerian Pidgin measured via MAFAND-MT only), using parallel corpora so that the language effect is isolated from content. Across 11 frontier and open tokenizers on FLORES-200+, every African language carries a tokenization premium above English (median 1.88x on GPT-5 / o200k_base, up to 8.92x for N'Ko); the penalty is largest for Ethiopic and N'Ko scripts (reaching 7-9x) and is near-invariant across corpora (FLORES vs SIB-200 Pearson r = 0.9998). Translated into deployment terms, this results in up to 8.9x inference cost and an equivalent generation-latency multiplier (N'Ko vs English on GPT-5; 7.4x for Amharic), and as little as 11% of English's effective context window. The best currently available tokenizer for African languages, Gemma 4, reduces the mean premium from 3.31x (cl100k_base) to 2.38x, but no tokenizer eliminates the penalty. We release an open measurement tool (afri-fertility), a public leaderboard, a results dataset, and mitigation guidance for African builders. The penalty falls hardest on the languages whose speakers can least afford it, a digital divide encoded directly into the subword vocabulary.