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) 2026-06-11

INFRAMIND: Infrastructure-Aware Multi-Agent Orchestration

arXiv:2606.11440v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing multi-agent LLM orchestration methods, ranging from brute-force ensembles to learned routers, select models and topologies based on task and model features. However, these methods do not consider the runtime state of the serving infrastructure. On shared GPU clusters under concurrent load, this infrastructure blindness causes systematic resource underutilization: preferred models accumulate deep request queues while equally capable alternatives sit idle. In multi-agent pipelines, where each query triggers multiple sequential model calls, these delays then compound across every downstream step. Closing this gap is challenging because the relevant infrastructure signals (queue depths, KV-cache pressure, latencies) are dynamic and noisy, and they must drive three different decisions: planning, per-step routing, and scheduling. We introduce INFRAMIND, a framework that makes the entire multi-agent stack infrastructure-aware. An infra-aware planner conditions topology and role selection on real-time system load and remaining budget, biasing toward simpler graphs under congestion and richer ones at low load. An infra-aware executor then observes per-model queue depths, cache utilization, and response latencies at each agent step to decide which model to call and how deeply to reason; a budget-aware scheduler further reorders each model's queue so that urgent requests are served first. Cast as a hierarchical constrained MDP and solved end-to-end via reinforcement learning, the system learns to balance quality against latency automatically. Across five benchmarks, INFRAMIND delivers up to +7.6 pp accuracy over the prior baseline at low load with up to 7x lower latency, and sustains up to 99.9% SLO compliance under high load where every baseline drops below 50%.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Measuring Research Difficulty of Academic Papers: A Case Study in Natural Language Processing

With the rapid growth of the number of academic papers, systematically evaluating the difficulty of research and its relationship to academic impact offers important significance for research topic selection and resource allocation. However, current studies lack quantitative assessments of research difficulty and its correlation with academic impact. This paper proposes a comprehensive evaluation system for research difficulty, incorporating factors such as academic collaboration, content, and references. Taking the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a case study, we extract both internal and external features from academic papers, compute multiple research difficulty indicators. We assign their weights using the entropy weight method and perform a weighted sum to obtain the research difficulty score of academic papers. This paper uses the citation frequency of academic papers to measure academic impact. To validate our approach, NLP experts assessed the difficulty of a sample of papers, and correlation analyses confirmed the reliability of our measurement. Empirical results reveal that in NLP, factors such as the number of pages, reference count, and participation of high-level institutions are significantly associated with academic impact. Moreover, we identify an inverted U-shaped relationship between research difficulty and academic impact. It suggests that moderately difficult research tends to achieve greater academic impact.

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

Simulation-Augmented Multi-Step Split Conformal Prediction for Aggregated Forecasts

arXiv:2606.16356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study uncertainty quantification for aggregated forecasting tasks such as annual totals and year-over-year growth rates. We propose SA-MSCP, a simulation-augmented multi-step split conformal method that generates future paths from cross-validated residuals using a block bootstrap and constructs prediction intervals from empirical quantiles. Experiments show that SA-MSCP improves empirical coverage over a simulated-path baseline for aggregated and growth-rate targets. Our results demonstrate that simulation-enhanced conformal calibration is an effective and general framework for uncertainty quantification in aggregated time-series forecasting.

04.
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.

05.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-08

Optimal minimal residual disease threshold in pediatric acute myeloid leukemia: A retrospective cohort study based on the TARGET database

by Xiong-yu Liao, Hong Zheng, Jian-pei Fang, Dun-hua Zhou, Kun-yin Qiu Background Minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring is a cornerstone of risk stratification in pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML), with a threshold of 0.1% conventionally defining positivity by flow cytometry. Advances in flow cytometric technologies, enabling detection of leukemic cells with higher sensitivity and specificity, warrant a reevaluation of whether a lower threshold improves prognostic accuracy. Methods and findings We conducted a retrospective cohort study using data from the Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET)-AML initiative. The study population comprised 1,205 pediatric patients with de novo AML treated across Children’s Oncology Group (COG) clinical trial centers. Patients were enrolled between September 1996 and December 2016, with a median follow-up of 6.2 years (range: 0.5–20.1 years). The primary objective was to compare the prognostic performance of the traditional MRD threshold (≥0.1%) with a lower threshold (≥0.05%) after induction courses 1 and 2. The main outcome measure was 5-year event-free survival (EFS). Analyses included Kaplan−Meier survival estimates, Cox proportional hazards models to calculate hazard ratios (HR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, and net reclassification improvement (NRI). The optimal threshold for predicting 5-year EFS, determined by ROC analysis, was 0.05% after both induction course 1 (AUC: 0.840, 95%CI[0.76,0.88]) and course 2 (AUC: 0.854, 95%CI[0.78,0.89]). The 0.05% threshold demonstrated higher HR for the first event than the 0.1% threshold (after course 1: HR = 2.8, 95%CI[2.3,3.3]; P 

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

Articulat3D: Reconstructing Articulated Digital Twins From Monocular Videos with Geometric and Motion Constraints

Building high-fidelity digital twins of articulated objects from visual data remains a central challenge. Existing approaches depend on multi-view captures of the object in discrete, static states, which severely constrains their real-world scalability. In this paper, we introduce Articulat3D, a novel framework that constructs such digital twins from casually captured monocular videos by jointly enforcing explicit 3D geometric and motion constraints. We first propose Motion Prior-Driven Initialization, which leverages 3D point tracks to exploit the low-dimensional structure of articulated motion. By modeling scene dynamics with a compact set of motion bases, we facilitate soft decomposition of the scene into multiple rigidly moving groups. Building on this initialization, we introduce Geometric and Motion Constraints Refinement, which enforces physically plausible articulation through learnable kinematic primitives parameterized by a joint axis, a pivot point, and per-frame motion scalars, yielding reconstructions that are both geometrically accurate and temporally coherent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Articulat3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on synthetic benchmarks and real-world casually captured monocular videos, significantly advancing the feasibility of digital twin creation under uncontrolled real-world conditions. Our project page is available at https://maxwell-zhao.github.io/Articulat3D/.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Study protocol and statistical analysis plan for a randomized controlled trial evaluating the safety and feasibility of the recombinant human platelet-derived growth factor B (rhPDGF-BB)-enhanced collagen plug for complex perianal fistula healing

Background A drug-repurposing-specific phenome-wide association study (PheWAS) demonstrated that patients with a single nucleotide variant that decreases expression of platelet-derived growth factor receptor beta (PDGFR{beta}) have a higher prevalence of fistulas, suggesting that PDGFR{beta} signaling is important for tissue repair. Recombinant human platelet derived growth factor B (rhPDGF) is an FDA-approved protein-based therapeutic that signals through PDGFR{beta} to heal and regenerate cutaneous skin wounds, periodontal tissue, and orthopedic bone with a strong safety profile. We hypothesize that rhPDGF will benefit other conditions identified by PheWAS with a similar physiological mechanism as the existing indications, such as complex perianal fistulas that are ineligible for a fistulotomy. Methods and analysis This prospective, blinded, single-site study aims to enroll 12 participants, randomized at a ratio of 2:1, comparing implantation of rhPDGF-enhanced collagen to routine care procedures, and stratified by fistula etiology, idiopathic versus Crohns disease (CD)-related. The primary outcome of this study will evaluate the technical performance of the rhPDGF-enhanced collagen implant for treatment of complex perianal fistulas as measured by the proportion of participants with successful implantation of the intervention without any intervention-related serious adverse events. The secondary outcomes will assess the preliminary safety and efficacy of the intervention based on all intervention-related adverse events, total fistulas healed, rate of fistula recurrence, and change in patient-reported symptoms. Complex perianal fistulas, idiopathic or CD-related, remain a major clinical challenge in need of new multimodal treatments aimed at tissue repair and regeneration. Pharmaceutical rhPDGF stimulation of PDGFR{beta} signaling promotes healing of skin, bone, and soft tissue. PheWAS revealed fistulas as a novel indication for repurposing rhPDGF. This protocol aims to evaluate the technical performance, preliminary safety and efficacy, and feasibility of rhPDGF-enhanced collagen for healing and remission of complex perianal fistulas. Ethics and dissemination This trial was approved by the Vanderbilt University Medical Center institutional review board (IRB#240585). Results will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Better Adherence, Richer Context: A Field Evaluation of LLM-Powered Conversational Voice Diaries for Sleep

arXiv:2606.18596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sleep diaries are central to behavioral sleep medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, yet daily completion is difficult to sustain, and static forms often provide limited context for interpreting night-to-night sleep variation. We designed an LLM-powered conversational voice diary that delivers clinically grounded morning and evening sleep diary questions through proactive smart-speaker prompts, structured conversational intake, and adaptive follow-up dialogue. We evaluated the system in a four-week between-subjects field study with 30 university students, comparing it with a text-based mobile diary using matched diary items, reporting windows, and reminder intervals. Compared with the text-based diary, the conversational voice diary showed higher adherence and elicited more detailed contextual self-report about routines, stressors, environmental conditions, and other sleep-related factors. Participants also described the voice diary as easier to integrate into daily routines, despite longer perceived completion time. However, voice-based conversational intake produced lower completeness for some structured diary fields, revealing a trade-off between expressive richness and structured precision. These findings show both the promise and the challenge of using LLM-powered conversational voice assistants for longitudinal health self-report.

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

Simulating Students' Java Programming Errors with Large Language Models

Understanding student errors in the programming is a cornerstone of programming education, yet obtaining a representative set of student errors for any newly designed task remains slow and costly, since authentic submissions only accumulate after extensive classroom deployment. This paper explores whether large language models (LLMs) can serve as scalable proxies for students by simulating realistic logical errors in code submissions. Using the CodeWorkout dataset of 74,000+ unique student Java submissions across 37 problems, we evaluate five LLMs under three mainstream prompting strategies: Input-Output (IO), Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and iterative Self-Refine. We assess performance along two key dimensions: diversity (the range of distinct error patterns) and alignment (alignment with authentic student mistakes), and examine how these vary by struggling level of programming tasks. Our quantitative findings reveal that while all models generate diverse errors, their alignment to human submissions diverges: Claude Sonnet 4 achieves the most balanced performance. In addition, we conducted a blinded expert annotation study (N = 401) comparing synthetic and authentic errors. This qualitative analysis confirms that the generated errors are functionally indistinguishable from authentic student errors. Moreover, higher-struggling-level problems elicit more diverse but less student-like errors. These results highlight trade-offs in using LLMs to simulate human learners and suggest design considerations for integrating synthetic errors into teachable agents, intelligent tutoring systems, and large-scale learning analytics.

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

Edges Before Embeddings: A Confidence-Aware Blur Gate for Vision-Language Pipelines

Production vision pipelines silently degrade on blurry input, wasting compute on downstream OCR, retrieval, and vision-language model (VLM) calls that cannot recover a usable output. We present MagikaDocumentFromPixel, a lightweight, CPU-friendly image quality gate that classifies a single image as sharp, blurred, or uncertain in roughly 7 ms on a single CPU core. The contributions are (i) a recipe selected from a 46-configuration, 8-sweep empirical search that isolates input resolution as the dominant lever and shows architecture capacity only pays off at >= 384 px; (ii) a confidence-aware routing formalism grounded in classical selective prediction; (iii) the Edge Prior Module (EPM), a Laplacian-magnitude auxiliary input channel that gives the network direct access to the spectral evidence that classical blur heuristics rely on and that lifts test F1 by +1.3 points in a matched-env comparison; and (iv) an observation that the gate is one instance of a recurring design pattern that appears independently in Magika content-type detection, risk-controlled OCR with VLMs, and DocVLM. The final recipe MobileNetV3-Large with the EPM trained at 384x384 on paired GoPro Large frames, evaluated with 5-scale test-time augmentation reaches F1 = 0.9803 (AUC 0.9989) with a 17 MB ONNX artifact, improving over our fixed-scale baseline on the same hardware (F1 = 0.9672) by +1.31 points. We are explicit about limitations: results are on a single motion-blur distribution, numbers are from a single seed, and calibration is qualitative rather than measured.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Multifidelity-Augmented Gaussian Process Inputs for Surrogate Modeling from Scarce Data

arXiv:2603.22050v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised machine learning describes the practice of fitting a parameterized model to labeled input-output data. Supervised machine learning methods have demonstrated promise in learning efficient surrogate models that can (partially) replace expensive high-fidelity models, making many-query analyses, such as optimization, uncertainty quantification, and inference, tractable. However, when training data must be obtained through the evaluation of an expensive model or experiment, the amount of training data that can be obtained is often limited, which can make learned surrogate models unreliable. In many engineering and scientific settings, cheaper low-fidelity models may be available, for example arising from simplified physics modeling or coarse grids. These models may be used to generate additional low-fidelity training data. The goal of multifidelity machine learning is to use both high- and low-fidelity training data to learn a surrogate model which is cheaper to evaluate than the high-fidelity model, but more accurate than any available low-fidelity model. This work proposes a new multifidelity training approach for Gaussian process regression which uses low-fidelity data to define additional features that augment the input space of the learned model. Similarly to cokriging estimators, the proposed approach conditions the high-fidelity surrogate model on the predictions of all available low-fidelity surrogate models, while benefiting from the computational efficiency of autoregressive estimators. Numerical experiments on several test problems demonstrate both increased predictive accuracy and reduced computational cost relative to the state of the art.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Sensor Configuration Matters: A Systematic Evaluation of Multimodal SLAM on Quadruped Robots

Autonomous navigation of quadrupedal robots in diverse environments fundamentally relies on resilient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). While visual-inertial SLAM has matured across wheeled, handheld, and aerial platforms, a critical evaluation gap remains regarding how hardware-level sensor configurations affect performance under the aggressive dynamics of legged locomotion. Quadrupeds introduce distinct embodiment-induced sensory challenges, including foot-impact shocks, high-frequency mechanical vibrations, and rapid angular rotations, which degrade standard perception pipelines. To address this gap, we present a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art visual, visual-inertial, and LiDAR-visual-inertial SLAM methods using the GrandTour dataset recorded on an ANYmal D quadruped. We isolate and quantify the impacts of camera modalities, shutter techniques, and inertial sensor tiers, analyzing their trade-offs across localization accuracy, algorithmic robustness, and computational resource utilization. Our empirical findings demonstrate that hardware selection has substantial influence on system resilience: stereo configurations consistently outperform monocular and RGB-D modalities, global shutter cameras significantly mitigate motion-induced tracking failures compared to rolling shutter cameras, and, crucially, standard inertial integration can degrade the performance of primarily vision-based frameworks under harsh legged locomotion. These insights additionally offer concrete design guidelines for tailoring custom sensor payloads to achieve dependable perception on agile legged systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

PostDeg: Placement Beats Parameterization in LayerNorm GNNs

arXiv:2606.14022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LayerNorm-based GNNs routinely erase the topology signals (degree, centrality, $k$-core) that node-selection policies should depend on, but the literature has not located where in the residual block the erasure happens. We answer that question: a positive per-node scalar inserted before LayerNorm is divided out up to a stabilizer term, while the same scalar inserted after LayerNorm reaches the score head as representation magnitude. The surviving slot is the post-LayerNorm position. We instantiate it with PostDeg, a parameter-free post-LayerNorm inverse-degree scale, and pre-register four falsifiers (graphwise scalars, extra LayerNorm, expressive same-slot capacity, backbone-agnostic source) that would reject the rule. PostDeg gains $+3.5\%/+2.5\%/+5.6\%$ over the LN backbone on influence maximization, network dismantling, and maximum independent set, with $10/10$ paired-seed wins per task; none of the four falsifiers fires. The takeaway is that placement, not parameterization, carries the gain – a small invariance check that generalizes to any positive topology scalar in any normalized residual stack.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Improving Lunar Topography with Deep Learning Schrödinger Bridges

Increasing the resolution of planetary topography models can enable a better understanding of surface processes and geomorphology; however, existing analytical super-resolution methods are expensive and difficult to apply at large scales. Generative models provide the tools to learn complex relationships within data and can be applied at scale due to hardware accelerators and parallelization. We present a diffusion-based Schrödinger Bridge (SB) generative modeling approach for lunar topography super-resolution, connecting the distribution of low-resolution topography to that of high-resolution topography, incorporating physically-constraining optical imagery. Our approach is inspired by existing Shape-from-Shading methods, which improve a priori low-resolution topography by using optical images at the target resolution. We train SBs on a novel dataset of rendered lunar topography, emulating optical imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Narrow Angle Camera. The result is a flexible approach for topography super-resolution which can provide pixel-level uncertainties in the reconstruction.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Evaluation of Trypanosoma brucei Phosphofructokinase Allosteric Inhibition: An In-Silico Study

Human African trypanosomiasis, caused by a protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei, is a neglected tropical disease for which well-tolerated, conveniently administered, and highly efficacious medicines are still missing. Previously, T. brucei Phosphofructokinase was targeted by small-molecule inhibitor development efforts. This approach has shown promise both in vitro and in vivo. In this study, we have used these wet-lab results, evaluated the compounds already characterised by Molecular Dynamics simulations, found relationships between in silico and wet-lab data and used these observations to evaluate compounds that we selected through several different approaches of virtual screens. We observed that inhibitor-ATP interactions are highly predictive of the inhibitory activity. Several compounds selected through virtual screens have outperformed previously characterised compounds.

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

PHANTOM: A Large-Scale Dataset of Multimodal Adversarial Attacks for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.24388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a large-scale, open-source dataset of pre-generated adversarial attacks for vision-language models (VLMs). The dataset is designed to be diverse, representative, and practical, extending existing benchmarks by covering 10 high-level categories and 55 subcategories of harmful intents. Our primary goal is to make adversarial data accessible to the research community, given the computational cost and complexity of generating large numbers of attacks. The dataset comprises 47 524 adversarial samples, generated using state-of-the-art attack strategies from recent literature. Our work complements existing efforts by consolidating and extending prior benchmarks from multiple established sources, resulting in 7 826 intents, and introduce an additional category to broaden coverage. This provides realistic evaluation resources for studying model robustness and alignment. Our dataset intends to enable researchers and practitioners to systematically evaluate the robustness and safety of VLMs, fine-tune attack-generation models, and develop or stress-test defensive guardrails under diverse adversarial conditions. By releasing this resource, we aim to lower the barrier to adversarial research and foster more reproducible, comprehensive, and comparable evaluations of VLM safety.

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

LLM4RTL: Tool-Assisted LLM for RTL Generation

arXiv:2606.15500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have facilitated impressive progress in software engineering, code generation, tooling, and systems. Concurrently, a significant body of research has developed which explores a growing variety of methods and systems for applying LLMs to hardware and chip design (e.g., systems for RTL code generation based on functional description). However, when it comes to open Verilog/RTL code-generation, we need high-quality training samples to build specialized and more effective LLM systems through fine-tuning or low-rank adaptation. Here, we propose a ``judge-renew-check-renew-check'' (JRCRC) pipeline which updates a current public dataset using a hierarchy of state-of-the-art commercial LLM models differing in their costs and capabilities in RTL code generation. This approach achieves a cost-effective mechanism for filtering and refining code-generation samples into a higher-quality training dataset. Our experiments also identify some common weaknesses of LLMs in rule-based reasoning and logic, and consequently, in RTL code-generation. Having identified these weaknesses, we develop an architecture for incorporating pre-processing tools to dynamically assist the LLMs in inferring logical relationships from tabular data formats. With our tools-assisted architecture for RTL code generation, we achieve significant overall performance gains in the VerilogEval benchmark and outperform many state-of-the-art methods. Our LLM4RTL system achieves performance comparable to that of GPT-4O using a significantly much smaller LLM.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

When to use what Schatten-$p$ norm in deep learning?

arXiv:2606.15268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Schatten-$\infty$ based optimizers such as Muon have shown promising empirical performance, but there remains seemingly conflicting observations regarding whether they are beneficial. We resolve this conflict by showing that the conclusion is regime dependent. Even when the objective is smooth in the Schatten-$\infty$ geometry, smaller Schatten-$p$ geometries can be optimal, specifically in the low-dimensional regime, which we show includes Chinchilla scaling. This conclusion follows from a new noise-robust acceleration result for the SODA framework for $p>2$. The same analysis explains why Muon-like methods do not require warmup, why they naturally favor large batches, and yields a batch size scaling rule for arbitrary $p$.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Kareus: Joint Reduction of Dynamic and Static Energy in Large Model Training

arXiv:2601.17654v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The computing demand of AI is growing at an unprecedented rate, but energy supply is not keeping pace. As a result, energy has become an expensive and contended resource that requires explicit management and optimization. Although recent works have made significant progress in large model training optimization, they focus on optimizing either dynamic or static energy consumption. We find that fine-grained kernel scheduling and frequency scaling jointly and interdependently impact both dynamic and static energy consumption. Based on this finding, we design Kareus, a training system that pushes the time-energy tradeoff frontier by optimizing both aspects. Kareus decomposes the intractable joint optimization problem into local, partition-based subproblems. It then uses a multi-pass multi-objective optimization algorithm to find execution schedules that push the time-energy tradeoff frontier. Compared to the state of the art, Kareus reduces training energy by up to 28.3% at the same training time, or reduces training time by up to 27.5% at the same energy consumption.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Trust Region On-Policy Distillation

On-Policy Distillation (OPD) is a fundamental technique for efficient post-training of large language models (LLMs), with broad applications in agent learning, multi-task enhancement, and model compression. However, OPD training becomes unstable when the teacher and student distributions differ substantially, as teacher supervision on student-generated tokens may yield unreliable policy gradients and even cause optimization failure. This work addresses reliable on-policy token-level supervision through credit assignment strategies, and proposes Trust Region On-Policy Distillation, TrOPD. It features the following characteristics: 1) Trust-Region On-Policy Learning: TrOPD performs OPD only in regions where the teacher provides reliable supervision, mitigating the optimization difficulty of the K1 reverse-KL estimator under distribution mismatch. 2) Outlier Estimation: For outlier regions, we explore gradient clipping, masking, and forward-KL estimation to reduce the adverse effects of unreliable supervision. 3) Off-Policy Guidance: The student continues generation from teacher prefixes and uses forward KL to imitate off-policy guidance, encouraging on-policy exploration toward reliable regions. Experiments show that TrOPD consistently outperforms SoTA OPD baselines, including OPD, EOPD, and REOPOLD, across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general-domain benchmarks.

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

MASK: Multi-Agent Semantic K-Scheduling for Risk-Sensitive 6G Robotics

arXiv:2606.11249v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Realizing the vision of 6G connected robotics requires reconciling high-performance collaborative control with the rigid spectral limitations of physical wireless channels. In realistic collaborative sensing scenarios, spectral resources are quantized into finite physical resource blocks or orthogonal subcarriers, rendering simultaneous transmission by all agents infeasible. To address this, we propose Multi-Agent Semantic K-Scheduling (MASK), a control architecture designed to sustain robust, risk-aware coordination under strict instantaneous bandwidth caps. We introduce Arbiter-Assisted Semantic Information Gating (A-SIG), a lightweight coordination mechanism that enforces hard access constraints by scheduling only the top-K agents based on locally computed semantic importance scores. By aggregating these prioritized observations into a compact latent state, a self-supervised global encoder enables a distributional policy to mitigate tail risks despite data sparsity. We evaluate MASK across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating that it matches the performance of communication-unconstrained baselines even when channel access is restricted to a small fraction of the swarm size. Furthermore, the framework exhibits inherent resilience to packet erasures, validating semantic scheduling as a critical enabler for resource-constrained 6G systems.

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

GRACE: Step-Level Benchmark for Faithful Reasoning over Context

Many reasoning tasks require models to reason over input context, from document-grounded question answering to rule-based deduction. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting produces traces that appear transparent, yet individual steps can silently deviate from the source evidence, even when the final answer is correct. Existing methods detect hallucinations at the response level but fail to identify where in the chain a failure occurs or what type it is. We introduce GRACE, the first human-annotated step-level faithfulness benchmark with a data-driven error taxonomy for context-grounded textual reasoning. GRACE covers CoT traces from 10 models across 4 source datasets, with each step annotated for faithfulness, error category, and natural language explanation. A data-driven taxonomy, discovered bottom-up via unsupervised clustering, organizes failures into two tracks: GRACE-Inference (deductive errors) and GRACE-Grounding (factual grounding errors), with four categories each. The evaluation set is human-annotated and challenging by design. Our experiments reveal substantial headroom for current models. In addition, integrating step-level faithfulness signals into reinforcement learning pipelines improves both downstream accuracy and reasoning reliability.

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

Flood Mapping from RGB imagery using a Vision Foundation Model

Timely, high-resolution maps of flood extent around settlements are essential for emergency response and damage assessment. We consider airborne RGB imagery for flood mapping as it can be collected rapidly at low cost. To produce flood maps, deep learning models for water segmentation are often used. CNN based and small vision transformer models are used. However, they need much data for adaptation to a change of scenery, i.e., another flooding event. Vision foundation models or large vision transformers are known to generalize across domains. Recently, foundation models for Earth observation became available. They are pretrained on satellite data, whose spatial resolution, viewing geometry, and radiometry differ from nadir RGB imagery. Thus, adaptation is required. We investigate how a satellite-pretrained Earth observation foundation model can be adapted to centimeter-scale floodwater mapping from RGB imagery. Specifically, we fine-tune a model we call Prithvi-2.0-UPN consisting of the Prithvi-EO-2.0-600M Vision Transformer combined with a UPerNet decoder for binary water segmentation on two RGB datasets (BlessemFlood21, NeuenahrFlood). In a first experiment we observe that Prithvi-2.0-UPN reaches state-of-the-art results on BlessemFlood21 and NeuenahrFlood, when trained on their datasets. In a second experiment we show that Prithvi-2.0-UPN performs better than state-of-the-art baseline models for transfer to a new flood event (trained on BlessemFlood21, tested on NeuenahrFlood) in a zero-shot setting. However, the performance indicates room for improvement. In this respect, we investigate in a third experiment how performance improves when further fine-tuning the models with small shares of NeuenahrFlood training data: Prithvi-2.0-UPN improves the fastest and reaches almost the performance level when fully trained on NeuenahrFlood, indicating transfer capabilities.

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

A Quantitative Analysis of Multimodal Biomarkers in Alzheimer's Disease

Despite increasing adoption of multimodal approaches in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) research – aimed at integrating molecular, structural, clinical, and genetic biomarkers to enhance disease characterization – the relationships among these modalities remain poorly understood. A systematic analysis of their dynamic interaction is essential for improving disease modeling, identifying redundant assessments, and reducing patient burden and acquisition costs. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of multimodal AD biomarkers by integrating tau-PET, structural MRI, cognitive scores (MMSE and CDR), and APOE4 data from 789 subjects drawn from the ADNI dataset. In our analyses, we (A) quantify cross-modal mutual information and explained variance to assess redundancy and predictive dependencies; (B) examine associations between tau topologies and structural atrophy across brain regions to select informative ROIs; (C) perform a statistical decomposition of the tau-cognition association into atrophy-related and atrophy-independent components; (D) and identify a dominant neurodegenerative trajectory that aligns with cognitive decline. This study provides a systematic characterization of cross-modal relationships, improving the interpretability and selection of biomarkers in AD. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/antonioscardace/Multimodal-AD.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Specialty Choice Attitudes Among Medical Interns: Evidence from Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences

Background: Choosing a medical specialty is a critical career decision that affects both physicians future professional lives and the composition of the healthcare workforce. Specialty preferences are shaped by multiple personal, educational, and socioeconomic factors, yet evidence from senior medical students in southern Iran remains limited. This study aimed to assess willingness to pursue specialty training among medical interns at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences, identify their preferred specialties, and examine factors associated with their decisions. Methods: This descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study was conducted in 2023 among medical interns at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences in Bandar Abbas, Iran. Using a convenience census approach, all eligible interns were invited to participate, and 83 students completed an online questionnaire. The instrument collected demographic, academic, and occupational data, as well as reasons for willingness or unwillingness to pursue specialty training and specialty preferences. Content and face validity were assessed by faculty members and students, and internal consistency reliability in the present study was acceptable (Cronbach alpha = 0.82). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and logistic regression in SPSS version 27. Results: Of the 83 participants, 50 (60.2%) reported willingness to pursue specialty training, while 33 (39.8%) did not. Among students willing to continue, the most frequently cited reasons were achieving a better economic position, broader job opportunities, and higher social status. Among those unwilling to continue, the most common reasons were fatigue from prolonged studying, financial problems, and the desire to start working after graduation. Radiology was the most common first-choice specialty, followed by otorhinolaryngology, dermatology, and cardiology. In regression analyses, no demographic or academic variable remained independently associated with willingness to pursue specialty training in the final multivariable model. Conclusions: A majority of medical interns were interested in pursuing specialty training, with preferences concentrated in a limited number of specialties perceived as offering favorable financial prospects, prestige, and lifestyle. Economic concerns and educational fatigue were the dominant factors influencing willingness and unwillingness to continue specialty education. These findings highlight the need for structured career counseling, broader exposure to different specialties, and policy measures to address financial and structural barriers to residency training. Keywords: medical specialty choice; medical interns; residency training; medical education; Hormozgan university of medical sciences