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.LG) 2026-06-18

Ensuring Trustworthy Online A/B Testing: Addressing Five Key Questions on CUPED

arXiv:2606.18750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A/B testing has become the gold standard for data-driven decision-making in large-scale online experimentation, providing critical guidance for feature launch, pricing optimization, and user experience enhancement. To maximize statistical sensitivity, many technology companies routinely employ Controlled-experiment Using Pre-Experiment Data (CUPED), a technique that achieves substantial variance reduction while preserving the unbiasedness of estimating the average treatment effect. Despite its widespread adoption, several critical methodological and practical nuances of CUPED remain underexplored. This paper systematically addresses five frequently encountered yet overlooked questions regarding the application of CUPED. First, we provide a comparative analysis of various post-CUPED estimators to identify the optimal adjustment specification. Second, we evaluate the validity of regression-based adjustments and delineate robust variance estimation methods tailored for such frameworks. Finally, we extend our investigation to complex but common scenarios, including multi-arm experiments and two-stage sampling designs. Our findings reveal that in these settings, naive reliance on standard variance estimators can lead to severely misleading inferences. By offering rigorous theoretical insights and extensive experimental validation, this work deepens the conceptual understanding of CUPED. Notably, the recommended methodologies have been successfully deployed and integrated into ByteDance's experimentation platform.

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

MedAI: Evaluating TxAgent's Therapeutic Agentic Reasoning in the NeurIPS CURE-Bench Competition

arXiv:2512.11682v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Therapeutic decision-making in clinical medicine constitutes a high-stakes domain in which AI guidance interacts with complex interactions among patient characteristics, disease processes, and pharmacological agents. Tasks such as drug recommendation, treatment planning, and adverse-effect prediction demand robust, multi-step reasoning grounded in reliable biomedical knowledge. Agentic AI methods, exemplified by TxAgent, address these challenges through iterative retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). TxAgent employs a fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B model that dynamically generates and executes function calls to a unified biomedical tool suite (ToolUniverse), integrating FDA Drug API, OpenTargets, and Monarch resources to ensure access to current therapeutic information. In contrast to general-purpose RAG systems, medical applications impose stringent safety constraints, rendering the accuracy of both the reasoning trace and the sequence of tool invocations critical. These considerations motivate evaluation protocols treating token-level reasoning and tool-usage behaviors as explicit supervision signals. This work presents insights derived from our participation in the CURE-Bench NeurIPS 2025 Challenge, which benchmarks therapeutic-reasoning systems using metrics that assess correctness, tool utilization, and reasoning quality. We analyze how retrieval quality for function (tool) calls influences overall model performance and demonstrate performance gains achieved through improved tool-retrieval strategies. Our work was awarded the Excellence Award in Open Science. Complete information can be found at https://curebench.ai/.

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

SCAR: Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval for Efficient Context Expansion in RAG

Fixed-length chunking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often leads to boundary fragmentation, where critical evidence is split across segments, degrading retrieval recall. While static windowing and parent retrieval improve recall, they introduce significant token overhead. We propose SCAR (Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval), an adaptive retrieval policy that selectively expands neighboring chunks by weighing query-neighbor relevance against a structural continuity penalty. SCAR uses a relative expansion threshold tied to each retrieved chunk's own query-relevance, yielding an approximately scale-invariant decision rule that transfers across embedding models without recalibration. Across four diverse corpora (RFC, GDPR, a 10-K report, and a Merger agreement; N=320 queries; 160 boundary-fragmented), SCAR achieves 92.8% recall on boundary-fragmented queries with only 7.84 chunks, a 22.9% reduction compared to static windowing (10.16 chunks). Paired bootstrap tests (B=10,000) confirm the chunk reduction is highly significant (p

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Non-invertible symmetries out of equilibrium: Eigenstate order and Floquet physics

arXiv:2508.14213v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Through the study of the Rep($D_8$) non-invertible symmetry, we show how non-invertible symmetries manifest in dynamics. Results are presented for dynamics generated by Hamiltonians as well as Floquet unitaries. For both examples, the role of the non-invertible symmetry is studied through the appearance of non-invertible symmetry protected edge modes. In addition, the role of the non-invertible symmetry for the Hamiltonian is studied through eigenstate order. In particular, by considering the effect of symmetry preserving disorder, the non-invertible symmetry is shown to give rise to degeneracies in the spectra of the Hamiltonian that can only be completely lifted at orders of perturbation that scale with system size. The eigenstates of disordered Hamiltonians, whose ground state correspond to non-trivial symmetry protected topological (SPT) states, are shown to have either trivial or non-trivial SPT order that are detected as non-zero expectation value of string order-parameters. In contrast, non-trivial SPT order is absent in the eigenstates of trivial SPT Hamiltonians with disorder. The interface between two different SPT phases host edge modes whose dynamics is studied numerically and analytically. The edge mode is shown to oscillate at frequencies related to different effective chain lengths that are weighted by the temperature, becoming an exact zero mode in the limit of zero temperature. A Floquet model with the non-invertible symmetry is constructed whose edge mode is shown to exhibit period-doubled dynamics at low effective-temperatures. The zero and period-doubled edge modes differ from those in conventional SPTs by being symmetric under the invertible symmetry, while being charged under the non-invertible symmetry.

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

Beyond representational alignment with brain-guided language models for robust reasoning

The correspondence between large language models (LLMs) and the neural mechanisms underlying human higher-order cognition remains insufficiently characterized. Given that language and reasoning in the human brain appear dissociable, an open question is whether LLMs align with neural signals from reasoning-related regions and whether such signals can improve them. Here, focusing on deductive reasoning, we show that LLM internal representations are not only partially aligned with task-fMRI activity but can also be directly enhanced by these signals. Using a neural-predictivity metric, we find that LLMs explain a substantial fraction of the explainable variance in reasoning-related regions at the aggregate level, whereas predictivity within specific reasoning types is lower, indicating both alignment and divergence. Building on this, we propose a brain-guided framework: we steer model representations along directions induced by the joint structure of model and brain representations, applying intervention at inference and fine-tuning during training. We demonstrate that task-evoked brain signals can directly enhance LLM reasoning, yielding gains orthogonal to language-only supervision across 10 LLMs (1.5B-72B), with transfer across reasoning types and up to 13\% absolute accuracy gain. Our results advance LLM-brain correspondences from correlation to guidance, establishing a brain-signal-driven pathway toward more robust and cognitively aligned AI.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

AI-Driven Analytics of Team-Teaching Talk: Acoustic Patterns across Experience, Cohorts and the Learning Design

arXiv:2606.09831v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As classroom cohorts expand, team teaching is increasingly used to integrate the expertise and pedagogical perspectives of multiple teachers. Yet, there is limited empirical understanding of how team teaching unfolds in practice, particularly regarding differences in teachers' contributions across experience levels, student cohorts, and learning task design. Prior research on team teaching has largely relied on retrospective self-reports or small-scale observations, offering limited insight into the micro-level processes through which team teaching is enacted. Teacher talk offers a scalable lens on these processes. While research in individual teaching contexts shows that acoustic features of speech (e.g., voice quality, intonation, and loudness) can shape student learning, evidence from team-teaching settings remains scarce. Moreover, capturing such features through manual observation or transcription is especially challenging in team-teaching classrooms, where multiple teachers speak across extended sessions and spatial locations, limiting scalability without automation. Grounded in spatial pedagogy theory and team-teaching research, this paper presents an AI-based speech processing approach to analyse classroom talk in team-teaching settings. We analysed 36 recorded undergraduate and postgraduate sessions involving 12 teachers. Spatial pedagogy behaviours were coded and acoustic features extracted to examine variation across teachers' experience, student cohorts, and the learning task design. The results reveal systematic differences, most notably in loudness dynamics: high-experience teachers, undergraduate classes and collaborative learning tasks exhibited greater loudness variation, suggesting more frequent modulation of volume to foreground key information and support classroom interaction and engagement.

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

BaltiVoice: A Speech Corpus and Fine-tuned Whisper ASR System for the Balti Language

作者:

We present BaltiVoice, a 16.8-hour read-speech corpus for Balti (ISO 639-3: bft), a Tibetic language spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, with no prior publicly available ASR resources. The corpus contains 10,060 validated utterances in native Nastaliq script, derived from Mozilla Common Voice recordings. Fine-tuning OpenAI Whisper-small yields a Word Error Rate (WER) of 26.74% and a Character Error Rate (CER) of 8.67% on a 538-utterance speaker-disjoint validation set, down from a zero-shot baseline of 159.19% WER and 152.52% CER. A Whisper-base fine-tuned on the same data achieves 44.54% WER and 15.61% CER, confirming that model capacity matters for this low-resource setting. The dataset, fine-tuned model, and a live transcription demo are publicly available on HuggingFace.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Patcher: Post-Hoc Patching of Backdoored Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.02995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak backdoor attacks, where adversaries poison safety alignment data to embed hidden triggers that bypass safety mechanisms. Existing defenses often require comprehensive attack information or multiple triggered examples, making them impractical when defenders only observe a single reported failure case without knowing whether it stems from a backdoor attack or a natural alignment bug. This paper presents Patcher, a post-hoc defense framework that repairs backdoored language models using only a single reported failure case and the model parameters. Patcher operates in two stages. First, it localizes backdoor triggers by computing response-conditioned gradient-based saliency scores and applying adaptive clustering to separate triggers from benign context. Second, it patches the model through a constrained fine-tuning objective that breaks the trigger-response association while preserving benign-task utility and robustness to non-triggered jailbreak attacks through KL-divergence constraints. We conduct extensive evaluations across multiple backdoor attack strategies and demonstrate that Patcher successfully localizes triggers and neutralizes backdoors while maintaining model utility. We further show robustness against adaptive attacks designed to evade our defense. This work represents a significant step toward practical defenses against training-time attacks in deployed language models.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Hierarchical Graph Learning for Calendar Spread Strategies in Commodity Futures Markets

arXiv:2606.25811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Commodity futures can be represented hierarchically, with underlying assets at the upper level and individual futures contracts at the lower level. Entities at each level can be connected by edges reflecting inherent correlations, with cross-level edges capturing contract-to-underlying asset connections. Building on our observations of these structures, we propose a hierarchical graph learning approach for calendar spread (CS) strategies in commodity futures markets, addressing two significant gaps in the machine-learning literature: (i) the absence of learning-based methods for CS strategies in futures markets, and (ii) the lack of consideration of maturity-dependent interrelationships across commodity futures. We first establish the efficacy of CS strategies by analytically showing that CS strategies can possess higher risk-adjusted returns, measured by the information ratio, and lower risk, measured by variance and delta, than long-only strategies. We then introduce a method to convert learning-based predictions into CS positions. Next, we develop a hierarchical graph learning method that predicts futures price movements by utilizing the maturity-dependent interrelationships, thereby yielding a CS trading algorithm. Empirical results on commodity futures markets traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group demonstrate that our method outperforms benchmark models in both prediction and trading performance. We find that maturity-dependent interrelationships across commodity futures are instrumental in prediction and that CS trading based on hierarchical graph learning is effective for statistical arbitrage.

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

Efficiently Representing Algorithms With Chain-of-Thought Transformers

The increasing popularity of reasoning models – language models that output a series of reasoning or thought tokens before producing an answer – is justified, in part, by theoretical results showing that chain-of-thought (CoT) transformers can simulate Turing machines, and thus perform arbitrary computation. However, the Turing machine, while suitable for complexity-theoretic analysis, is not convenient, intuitive, or efficient for discussing algorithms. Algorithms are typically designed and analyzed at a higher level of abstraction, captured by the Word RAM model with random-access memory and unit-cost operations on $\bigO(\log n)$-bit words. As a result, Word RAM algorithms can be substantially more efficient than their Turing machine counterparts, raising the question: Can CoT transformers efficiently simulate Word RAM algorithms? For instance, can they sort $n$ items in $\bigO(n \log n)$ steps or run Dijkstra's algorithm in $\bigO(E + V \log V)$ steps? We answer affirmatively, up to poly-logarithmic overhead. We first establish this for finite-precision transformers with poly-logarithmic width and rightmost unique hard attention, then strengthen the result to two more practical settings with finite width and log-precision: continuous CoT, where reasoning takes the form of vectors rather than tokens, and a hybrid architecture in which transformer layers sit atop a recurrent (linear RNN) layer. In all three cases, we find that CoT can efficiently simulate any Word RAM algorithm with only a poly-logarithmic overhead in $n$. This overhead reduces to log-square when the Word RAM has a ``flat'' instruction set, and only logarithmic for multiplication-free flat instructions – in stark contrast to known CoT simulations of Turing machines, which require quadratic overhead over Word RAM.

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

Deep Learning and Elicitability for McKean-Vlasov FBSDEs With Common Noise

arXiv:2512.14967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a novel numerical method for solving McKean–Vlasov forward–backward stochastic differential equations (MV–FBSDEs) with common noise, combining Picard iterations, elicitability and deep learning. The key innovation involves elicitability to derive a pathwise loss function, enabling efficient training of neural networks to approximate both the backward process and the conditional expectations arising from common noise, without requiring computationally expensive nested Monte Carlo simulations. The mean-field interaction term is parameterized via a recurrent neural network trained to minimize an elicitable score, while the backward process is approximated through a hybrid feedforward and recurrent network representing the decoupling field. We validate the algorithm on a systemic-risk inter-bank borrowing and lending model, where analytical solutions exist, demonstrating accurate recovery of the true solution. We further extend the model to quantile-mediated interactions, showcasing the flexibility of the elicitability framework beyond conditional means or moments. Finally, we apply the method to a non-stationary Aiyagari–Bewley–Huggett economic growth model with endogenous interest rates, illustrating its applicability to complex mean-field games without closed-form solutions.

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

HOLMES: Evaluating Higher-Order Logical Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv:2606.23238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Logical reasoning is essential for reliable AI, yet existing benchmarks are largely first-order-logic-centric, focusing on object-level deduction over fixed predicates. This misses many realistic scenarios where models must reason over rules, predicates, functions, constraints, and decision procedures themselves. We introduce HOLMES (Higher-Order Logic Meets real-world Explainable Symbolic reasoning), the first real-world benchmark for higher-order symbolic reasoning in LLMs, containing 1379 instances. Built on higher-order logic, HOLMES pairs natural-language problems with HOL formalizations, ground-truth answers, verifiable reasoning traces, and fine-grained controllable reasoning factors across law and finance. Experiments show that current LLMs still struggle on HOLMES, with an average accuracy of only 50.64% and the best model reaching 59.54%. Our analyses further reveal that high final-answer accuracy can mask shortcut reasoning in conflict-resolution settings, while performance drops sharply under scope-conditioned and compositional reasoning. These findings identify higher-order symbolic reasoning as a key bottleneck for building reliable and verifiable LLMs. The project code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/wuyucheng2002/HOLMES.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Second-Order Approximation of Limit Order Books in a Single-Scale Regime

arXiv:2308.00805v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We establish a first- and second-order approximation for an infinite dimensional limit order book model in a single (critical) scaling regime where market and limit orders arrive at a common time scale. With our choice of scaling we obtain non-degenerate first- and second-order approximations for the price and volume dynamics. While the first-order approximation is given by a coupled ODE-PDE system, the second-order approximation is described in terms of an infinite-dimensional stochastic evolution equation driven by a cylindrical Brownian motion. The driving noise processes exhibit a non-trivial correlation in terms of the model parameters. We prove that the evolution equation has a unique solution and that the sequence of standardized limit order book models converges weakly to the solution of the evolution equation. The proof uses a non-standard martingale problem. We calibrate a linearized model to market data and explain how our model can be used for deriving confidence intervals of portfolio liquidation values.

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

Interpretable Sperm Morphology Classification via Attention-Guided Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.20438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Male infertility is a major cause of couple infertility, often linked to abnormal sperm morphology. While deep learning models offer automated analysis, most lack interpretability, limiting their clinical adoption. This study proposes an attention-guided deep learning framework for sperm morphology classification. We combine a pretrained EfficientNet-B0 with a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to focus on key areas of the sperm head, improving both accuracy and interpretability. Evaluated on the SMIDS and HuSHem public datasets, our model achieves accuracies of 90.2% and 93.9% (macro F1 scores of 0.913 and 0.948), outperforming SimpleCNN and standard EfficientNet-B0. Furthermore, we use Grad-CAM++ visualizations to highlight features influencing the model's decisions. The results demonstrate that this accurate and transparent framework is a practical tool for automated sperm analysis in fertility clinics.

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

Entangled states are typically incomparable

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

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

GCT-MARL: Graph-Based Contrastive Transfer for Sample-Efficient Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.25073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), from a deployment perspective, it is challenging and expensive to train agents from scratch for each new environment or task. In this work, we propose GCT-MARL, a transfer learning framework that builds on the multi-view graph contrastive backbone of MAIL and augments it with a per-view, adaptively weighted alignment loss and a two-phase training protocol specifically designed for transfer across populations of varying sizes and compositions. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed framework markedly accelerates convergence on the target task relative to from-scratch training, in both homogeneous (within-faction, varying N) and heterogeneous (cross-faction and mixed unit-type) transfer scenarios. Furthermore, we show that the framework naturally supports continual learning by sequentially chaining the two-phase transfer protocol across a series of related tasks. Overall, this work provides a unified approach to mitigating key limitations in current MARL transfer methods with new insights at both methodological and empirical levels.

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

INI-VPINN: A Variational Physics-Informed Neural Network with Implicit Neumann and Interface Handling for Multi-Material Domains with Geometric Singularities

arXiv:2606.18032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a new weak-form Physics-Informed Neural Network approach (named INI-VPINN). INI-VPINN naturally incorporates Neumann boundary and interface conditions into the variational formulation. It removes the need for additional loss terms or multiple subdomain networks. This framework employs compact support weighting functions and integration by parts to implicitly impose flux and continuity constraints. In this way, it implicitly ensures physical consistency across material boundaries. The proposed method is tested on Poisson and Laplace problems with sharp interfaces and complex geometries. Results show that, compared with several other Physics Informed Neural Networks-based formulations, the INI-VPINN consistently achieves higher accuracy, smoother and faster convergence. The proposed framework provides a general approach for solving multimaterial problems with complex geometries and mixed Neumann-Dirichlet boundary conditions using neural networks. The implementation is publicly available in a GitHub repository.

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

AI Tokenomics: The Economics of Tokens, Computation, and Pricing in Foundation Models

作者:

arXiv:2606.24616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tokens have become the practical accounting unit for modern foundation model services, linking information processing, computation, memory use, energy expenditure, pricing, and economic value. This paper develops a framework for AI tokenomics: the study of how tokens are generated, consumed, priced, allocated, and optimized across AI systems. We connect token-level technical costs to workflow-level production functions, enterprise resource allocation, measurement and instrumentation methods, and emerging market-design questions. The framework shows that token expenditure and economic value are distinct: value depends on marginal productivity, workflow position, hidden reasoning activity, risk, and downstream propagation effects. The paper concludes by identifying open research directions in hidden-token measurement, empirical calibration, token productivity, dynamic allocation, and token-based markets.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Can News Predict the Market? Limits of Zero-Shot Financial NLP and the Role of Explainable AI

Can financial news reliably predict short-term stock movements? Despite advances in large language models, this question remains unresolved. We revisit this problem using a zero-shot natural language processing framework, investigating whether models can extract actionable signals from financial news without domain-specific training. We design a structured pipeline that combines zero-shot natural language inference with temporal aggregation, explicitly modelling recency and event-dependent impact horizons when integrating information across articles. To address the need for transparency in high-stakes settings, we introduce a multi-layered explainability framework that links predictions to token-level, article-level, and aggregate evidence, and produces grounded natural language rationales. Across multiple models and prediction horizons, we find that zero-shot approaches consistently fail to outperform simple baselines, with particularly weak performance on negative movements, suggesting deeper structural limitations in mapping news sentiment to short-term price dynamics. However, explainability signals reliably distinguish between trustworthy and unreliable predictions, offering practical value even when accuracy is limited. These findings highlight the limits of zero-shot financial NLP and motivate a shift toward decision-support systems that prioritise transparency and uncertainty awareness. Code: https://github.com/alimert05/zero-shot-stock-xai

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

Safe and Generalizable Hierarchical Multi-Agent RL via Constraint Manifold Control

arXiv:2606.24010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent systems are widely used in safety-critical applications that require coordinated behavior under strict safety constraints. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: learning-based methods achieve strong empirical performance but lack theoretical safety guarantees, while control-theoretic methods enforce safety but often lead to overly conservative and inefficient behaviors. We propose a hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that enforces hard safety constraints under mild assumptions at low level via a constraint manifold, while enabling effective coordination through high-level policy learning. Our approach provides theoretical safety guarantees in the multi-agent setting and yields stationary learning dynamics, thereby enabling stable and efficient training. Empirically, our method achieves competitive performance while maintaining nearly perfect safety rates, and generalizes effectively to varying numbers of agents and obstacles.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?

Game generation is an emerging application of coding agents, requiring models to transform natural-language specifications into playable interactive systems. Unlike traditional coding tasks, game generation takes place within a game engine, where scripts, scenes, assets, rendering, and runtime interactions must jointly produce coherent gameplay. We formalize end-to-end game generation as the problem of producing a complete game artifact that realizes a specification through observable player-game interaction in a target environment. We argue that evaluating this setting requires three desiderata: Engine Grounding, Artifact Completeness, and Interactive Verification. We propose an interaction-grounded evaluation framework that assesses executable gameplay through replayed demonstrations and rubric-guided multimodal judging. We instantiate this framework as GameCraft-Bench, a benchmark comprising 140 Godot tasks across 15 game families. Evaluations of frontier coding agents show that end-to-end game generation remains highly challenging: the strongest agent achieves only 41.46%, and most agents score below 40%. Further analysis reveals that while agents often implement recognizable mechanics, they struggle to deliver complete games with sufficient content, functional visual feedback, and coherent presentation. See https://tongxuluo.github.io/gamecraft-bench-website for demos, code, and data.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Hardware-Oriented Inference Complexity of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

arXiv:2604.03345v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have recently emerged as a powerful architecture for various machine learning applications. However, their unique structure raises significant concerns regarding their computational overhead. Existing studies primarily evaluate KAN complexity in terms of Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs) required for GPU-based training and inference. However, in many latency-sensitive and power-constrained deployment scenarios, such as neural network-driven non-linearity mitigation in optical communications or channel state estimation in wireless communications, training is performed offline and dedicated hardware accelerators are preferred over GPUs for inference. Recent hardware implementation studies report KAN complexity using platform-specific resource consumption metrics, such as Look-Up Tables, Flip-Flops, and Block RAMs. However, these metrics require a full hardware design and synthesis stage that limits their utility for early-stage architectural decisions and cross-platform comparisons. To address this, we derive generalized, platform-independent formulae for evaluating the hardware inference complexity of KANs in terms of Real Multiplications (RM), Bit Operations (BOP), and Number of Additions and Bit-Shifts (NABS). We extend our analysis across multiple KAN variants, including B-spline, Gaussian Radial Basis Function (GRBF), Chebyshev, and Fourier KANs. The proposed metrics can be computed directly from the network structure and enable a fair and straightforward inference complexity comparison between KAN and other neural network architectures.

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

Formal Verification of Learned Multi-Agent Communication Policies via Decision Tree Distillation

arXiv:2606.19632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables agents to develop coordination strategies through emergent communication, but neural policies lack the formal safety guarantees required for safety-critical robotic deployment in drone swarms and autonomous vehicle fleets. We present the first end-to-end framework for safety verification of learned multi-agent communication policies through policy abstraction: neural policies are distilled into interpretable decision trees, then formally verified, with empirical validation confirming that verified safety properties transfer to original networks. Our four-stage pipeline consists of domain-specific feature extraction from agent observations, decision tree distillation achieving 97.9% +/- 1.2% fidelity to neural policies, automated translation to PRISM probabilistic model checker specifications with complete feature-to-state-variable correspondence, and compositional verification of Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) properties via pairwise decomposition with union-bound aggregation and empirical neighbor modeling. Evaluating Vector-Quantized Variational Information Bottleneck (VQ-VIB) policies for multi-drone coordination with 5-7 agents, we verify 18 temporal logic properties across safety, liveness, and cooperation, achieving 88.9% property satisfaction with all five safety thresholds satisfied (0.3% collision probability vs. 1% threshold). Monte Carlo validation of original neural policies confirms that verified safety properties transfer with

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

Interpreting Neural Combinatorial Optimization via Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) achieves strong performance, yet its black-box nature remains a key roadblock to deployment and scientific diagnosis. Standard interpretability tools, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are ill-equipped for NCO, whose decisions are dynamic, state-dependent, and lack proper concept vocabulary definition. To close this gap, we introduce Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks (EPB), to our knowledge, the first framework for interpreting NCO policies by distilling black-box NCO models into human-readable program portfolios. EPB employs an LLM to autonomously evolve a bank of programs, where each program's per-step action distribution serves as the bottleneck. EPB works through an iterative framework: Block I fixes program bank capacity and introduces a hybrid textual-numerical gradient descent scheme that couples numerical gradients for student router updates and textual gradients for LLM-based program revision; Block II dynamically adapts bank capacity via fault-targeted expansion and redundancy pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate EPB's effectiveness and broad applicability, where the distilled program portfolios largely match original performance. EPB also reveals that NCO behavior shifts across optimization stages and can be approximated as a composition of classic heuristic variants. Our work advances interpretable NCO and establishes EPB as a promising tool for interpreting sequential decision-making models.