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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

RACL: Reasoning-Agent Control Layers for Continuous Metaheuristic Learning

arXiv:2606.20142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces RACL, a Reasoning-Agent Control Layer for metaheuristics. RACL places a reasoning agent above an existing optimizer. The agent does not replace the optimizer and does not modify business constraints. Instead, it controls the optimizer's internal search behavior by observing operational memory, reasoning over past behavior, formulating bounded hypotheses, testing interventions, evaluating outcomes, applying guardrails, consolidating useful policies and explaining its decisions. The experiment uses vehicle routing as a testbed, but the contribution is not a new routing solver, a particular ALNS configuration or a specific set of routing rules. The contribution is the RACL method: a way for a reasoning agent to discover, validate, consolidate and explain algorithmic control rules for a metaheuristic. In the current experimental setting, RACL improves or ties the Operational Memory Policy in 21 of 21 feasible cases and improves or ties a non-reasoning Stagnation-Triggered Policy in 18 of 21 feasible cases, with an average RACL vs STP cost delta of -0.641%. In the Sevilla-9/10 runtime sample, RACL improves average cost by -8.337% versus Fixed and -1.605% versus STP without showing material computational overhead. During the proof-of-concept, Codex was used as an in-the-loop reasoning agent observing executions, interpreting logs and proposing live bounded interventions. The policy proxy was later used only to make quantitative evaluation reproducible.

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

Detecting undisclosed LLM-generated content in parliamentary texts

In this paper, we evaluate the extent of undisclosed LLM-generated content in texts from the parliaments of the United Kingdom and Sweden. In many areas, such as in journalism or in academic writing, there are often requirements to clearly disclose whether AI tools, such as LLMs, have been used. In the case of parliamentary texts, the guidelines on disclosure of AI use are more vague. However, in order to maintain transparency and retain public trust, it is generally recommended that parliamentarians should state whether or not they have used AI when writing texts, such as parliamentary motions. Here, we train an interpretable (glass-box) text classifier using pre-LLM parliamentary texts and LLM-generated versions of such texts. We then apply the classifier to a test set containing recent parliamentary texts, finding a steady increase in undisclosed LLM use, in both parliaments, from 2022 onwards.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Analytic Bijections for Smooth and Interpretable Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2601.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A key challenge in normalizing flows is finding expressive invertible scalar bijections. Existing approaches face trade-offs: affine transformations are smooth and analytically invertible but lack expressivity; monotonic splines offer local control but are only piecewise smooth and act on bounded domains; residual flows achieve smoothness but need numerical inversion. We introduce three families of analytic bijections that are globally smooth ($C^\infty$), defined on all of $\mathbb{R}$, and analytically invertible in closed form, combining the favorable properties of prior approaches. Beyond serving as drop-in replacements in coupling flows, where they match or exceed spline performance, we develop radial flows: a novel architecture using direct parametrization that transforms the radial coordinate while preserving angular direction. Radial flows exhibit exceptional training stability, produce geometrically interpretable transformations, and on targets with radial structure can achieve comparable quality to coupling flows with $1000\times$ fewer parameters. We provide comprehensive evaluation on 1D and 2D benchmarks, and demonstrate applicability to higher-dimensional physics problems through experiments on $\phi^4$ lattice field theory, where our bijections outperform affine baselines and enable problem-specific designs that address mode collapse.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Strong-field control of the $Z$-boson resonance in $e^+e^-$ collisions

arXiv:2606.09394v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Resonant $Z$-boson production is a cornerstone of precision electroweak physics, with its vacuum line shape set by the $Z$ mass, width, and collision kinematics. We show that a strong laser field can significantly alter this picture. By treating the field nonperturbatively, we find that laser dressing of the incoming fermions alters the effective collision kinematics and opens laser-photon exchange channels, including multiphoton processes, in $e^{+}e^{-}$ collisions. As a result, the $Z$-resonance profile develops distinct intensity-dependent regimes, evolving from the vacuum limit to saturation at intermediate field strengths and to an approximately quadratic enhancement at higher intensities. Additionally, the polarization composition of the produced $Z$ bosons is redistributed. In particular, at high intensities the laser-induced contribution can compensate the intrinsic chiral asymmetry of the electroweak interaction, leading to nearly parity-balanced $Z$-boson production. Our results identify that strong classical fields can dynamically control electroweak resonance phenomena, opening a bridge between strong-field QED and high-energy collider physics.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

PACT: Privileged Trace Co-Training for Multi-Turn Tool-Use Agents

Multi-turn tool-use agents must reason, call tools, and adapt to observations across several interaction turns. Post-training such agents is challenging, as reinforcement learning often suffers from sparse rewards and weak credit assignment despite matching the prompt-only inference setting, while supervised fine-tuning on expert traces provides dense process supervision but can over-constrain the model to fixed trajectories. To tackle this, we propose PACT, a Privileged trAce Co-Training framework for multi-turn tool-use agents. The key idea is to use expert traces only as training-time optimization signals rather than rollout-time hints. PACT keeps rollout generation prompt-only, then uses expert traces to guide optimization through two complementary signals: a trace-conditioned RL surrogate that evaluates prompt-only rollouts under expert-trace context, and a component-aware SFT loss that supervises reasoning prefixes and tool-calls with annealed strength. To reduce over-reliance on the training-only trace context, PACT further introduces a prompt-only anchoring. We also provide a latent-trace view that connects the two trace-based objectives and explains how expert traces can guide optimization without being used during rollout generation. Experiments on FTRL, BFCL, and ToolHop show that PACT consistently improves over strong SFT- and RL-based baselines, highlighting the value of privileged trace co-training for multi-turn tool-use learning.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum geometrical description of hole spin qubits far away from the $\Gamma$-point

arXiv:2606.14683v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hole spin qubits provide one of the leading platforms for spin-based quantum computing due to their large intrinsic spin-orbit interaction (SOI), which enables fast electrical manipulation. The SOI of planar quantum dots has mostly been investigated in theoretical studies by examining the SOI already present in the two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG). Here, we study the SOI created by the in-plane confinement by deriving non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians numerically for hole spin qubits. We find that the quantum geometry of the 2DHG naturally emerges, leading to a meaningful non-perturbative definition of pseudospin valid far away from the $\Gamma$-point. The SOI of the 2DHG and of the in-plane confinement have different forms; therefore, they cannot be turned off simultaneously, ruining the perfect spin-orbit switch functionality of spin qubits. We construct effective Hamiltonians using the symmetry approach for various low-dimensional hole systems: (i) a heavy-hole confined in a SiGe/Ge/SiGe heterostructure, (ii) a light-hole confined in SnGe/Ge, (iii) a gate-defined nanowire in SiGe/Ge/SiGe, and (iv) a hole confined in a Ge/Si core/shell nanowire. The non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians provide results with excellent agreement with the full Hamiltonians.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Revisiting LLM Adaptation for 3D CT Report Generation: A Study of Scaling and Diagnostic Priors

Recent advances in multimodal learning, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), have demonstrated strong adaptability to natural images. However, extending their use to the medical domain, particularly for volumetric (3D) images, is challenging due to high computational complexity, volumetric dependencies and the semantic gap between visual features and clinical terminology. Naively fine-tuning LLMs on limited medical data often leads to overfitting and clinical hallucination, where linguistic fluency is prioritized over clinical factuality. In this study, we investigate parameter-efficient adaptation strategies for volumetric CT report generation and introduce RAD3D-Prefix, a lightweight diagnostic-prior conditioning framework that minimizes the need for extensive parameter training. This module integrates image embeddings with multi-label diagnostic classification logits, preserving critical clinical details while bridging the semantic gap. By keeping the LLM frozen, our method requires minimal trainable parameters and mitigates the risk of overfitting on small, domain-specific datasets. Through a systematic study spanning LLMs from 96.1M to 1.6B parameters, we find that fine-tuning is most beneficial for smaller LLMs, whereas freezing larger (~1B+ LLMs and training only lightweight projection layers provides a superior trade-off between performance, generalization, and computational efficiency. Across multiple automatic metrics and a clinical reader study, RAD3D-Prefix outperforms comparable parameter-efficient baselines and demonstrates strong out-of-domain generalization while using substantially fewer trainable parameters than fully fine-tuned alternatives.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

An Agentic Retrieval Framework for Autonomous Context-Aware Data Quality Assessment

arXiv:2606.13692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data quality assessment is a critical prerequisite for effective data analytics and data-driven decision-making, yet it remains a challenging task due to the inherently context-dependent nature of data quality. Existing approaches often rely on static rules or manual assessment strategies, limiting their adaptability to diverse usage scenarios and constraining automation at scale. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, offer new opportunities for automating data quality assessment, but raise concerns related to reliability, grounding, and execution safety. In this paper, we propose a unified agentic-retrieval framework for autonomous context-aware data quality assessment. The framework interprets natural-language descriptions of intended data usage, derives context-aware assessment strategies, and generates executable validation logic through a multi-agent workflow. To ensure operational reliability, the framework introduces a feasibility validation stage that evaluates the realism and executability of generated assessment specifications before execution, enabling iterative refinement when necessary. Accepted validation logic is executed deterministically to guarantee reproducible and auditable results. We implement the proposed framework as an end-to-end prototype and evaluate it across multiple usage scenarios applied to the same dataset. The results demonstrate that assessment outcomes adapt meaningfully to different intended uses, while feasibility-gated execution reduces unrealistic or non-executable rule generation. The proposed approach provides a practical foundation for deploying autonomous yet controlled data quality assessment in modern data-driven environments.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Continuous Cross-Domain Traffic State Prediction via Memory-Augmented Graph Liquid Time-Constant Networks

arXiv:2606.15807v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic state prediction is a fundamental task in intelligent transportation systems. In practical applications, some regions suffer from limited traffic observations due to insufficient sensing infrastructure, making cross-domain knowledge transfer an important solution for data-scarce traffic prediction. However, existing cross-domain traffic prediction methods still face several limitations, including coarse-grained source-target adaptation, limited capability in handling unseen target-domain patterns, and insufficient modeling of continuous traffic dynamics under irregular or heterogeneous temporal conditions. To address these issues, this paper proposes a continuous cross-domain traffic prediction framework, termed Memory-Augmented Graph Liquid Time-Constant Network (MA-GLTC). Specifically, we first construct spatio-temporal units (STUs) to decompose traffic networks into transferable local units, enabling fine-grained knowledge alignment across domains. Then, a graph liquid time-constant network (GLTC) is developed to model graph-coupled traffic evolution in continuous time. Different from generic graph neural ODE-based models, GLTC introduces graph-coupled recurrent conductance into liquid time-constant dynamics, allowing node states to evolve with leakage, adaptive time constants, and neighborhood-aware feedback. Furthermore, a Memory-based Transfer Storage (MTS) mechanism is designed to preserve source-domain knowledge, retrieve matched traffic patterns, and update reliable target-domain patterns when unseen states emerge. Experiments on five public traffic datasets demonstrate that MA-GLTC consistently outperforms representative innerdomain and cross-domain baselines in both short-term and longterm prediction tasks. Compared with the second-best method, MA-GLTC reduces the average prediction errors by 3.02%, 0.33%, 8.92%, 10.09%, and 2.11%, respectively.

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

One Polluted Page Is Enough: Evaluating Web Content Pollution in Generative Recommenders

Search-augmented LLMs increasingly mediate everyday consumer recommendations by retrieving live web content. This creates a new risk: generative recommenders may consume polluted web content, such as fake reviews and promotional pages crafted to mislead recommendations. We ask: to what extent do search-augmented LLMs become unwitting promoters of fake products when consuming polluted retrieval results? To answer this, we introduce FORGE (Fake Online Recommendations in Generative Environments), a benchmark for measuring fake-product promotion under controlled web-content pollution. Given an upstream search result, FORGE locally rewrites real products in retrieved web pages into fake ones to simulate web-content pollution, and measures how often the LLM recommends the fake product. FORGE covers 225 real-world products across 15 categories and 5 consumer scenarios. Across 12 commercial and open-weights LLMs, all models are vulnerable: a single polluted page yields fooled rates of up to 27%, while the full top-3 replacement raises this to 73.8%. Vulnerability varies substantially across categories, increasing when models lack stable prior knowledge of the relevant products. Reasoning does not mitigate this vulnerability; instead, it often generates spurious social proof to justify false recommendations. We evaluate three defenses: skepticism prompting and consensus filtering (over model priors or cross-document evidence). Skepticism can exacerbate vulnerability, much like reasoning, while filtering risks suppressing legitimate products. We release FORGE at https://github.com/leoluolol/forge-benchmark.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Rock weathering can counteract river CO<sub>2</sub> emissions induced by permafrost thaw

Authors:

Climate-induced permafrost thaw unlocks large stores of organic carbon that are mineralized and emitted as carbon dioxide (CO2) from rivers to the atmosphere1. Concurrently, warming and permafrost thaw can increase mineral weathering rates, thus affecting the release and sequestration of inorganic carbon2–4. Yet how these biological and geological carbon cycles interact and jointly affect CO2 dynamics (emission compared with drawdown) in permafrost rivers remains unknown5. Here we combine CO2 emissions, organic and inorganic solute concentrations, dual carbon isotopes (δ13C–Δ14C) and geochemical modelling to infer how permafrost thaw may affect river biogeochemistry over decades to centuries across the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Leveraging a gradient of thermal permafrost degradation, we find that river CO2 emissions decline, whereas solute fluxes from rock weathering increase with decreasing permafrost cover. Across this region, net CO2 drawdown fluxes from rock weathering are about 35% of river CO2 emissions, varying from around 15% in catchments with continuous permafrost to more than 100% in catchments with discontinuous or isolated permafrost. Thus, carbon fluxes from chemical weathering may become increasingly important with ongoing permafrost thaw, potentially even outpacing river CO2 emissions. Our findings disentangle the interplay between biological and geological carbon fluxes that are important for the cryosphere and the global carbon cycle. Permafrost thaw on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau increases rock-weathering rates while reducing river CO2 emissions, suggesting geological carbon fluxes may eventually outpace thaw-driven emissions.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Unveiling coherent dynamics in non-Markovian open quantum systems: exact expression and recursive perturbation expansion

arXiv:2506.04097v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a systematic framework to derive the effective Hamiltonian governing the coherent dynamics of non-Markovian open quantum systems. By applying the minimal dissipation principle, we uniquely isolate the coherent contribution to the time-local generator of the reduced dynamics. We derive a general expression for the effective Hamiltonian and develop a recursive perturbative expansion that expresses it in terms of system-bath interaction terms and bath correlation functions. This expansion provides a systematic tool for analyzing energy renormalization effects across different coupling regimes. Applying our framework to paradigmatic spin systems, we reveal how environmental correlations influence energy shifts and eigenbasis rotations, offering new insights into strong-coupling effects and non-Markovian quantum thermodynamics.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Five-Plane Reference Architecture for Runtime Governance of Production AI Agents

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprise security was built to govern data boundaries: the protected surface was data at rest and in transit, and the controls – access control, data-loss prevention, perimeter inspection – governed crossings of that boundary. Production AI agents dissolve this assumption. An agent reads context, calls tools, invokes connectors, and modifies systems of record on an enterprise's behalf, so risk moves inside the workflow, into sequences of individually-permitted actions that may transform a business process no one authorized. Existing policy engines do not extend to this regime: they evaluate request-time decisions against atomic principals, where agentic systems require stateful evaluation against composite principals whose authority attenuates through delegation chains. We present a reference architecture for the runtime governance of production agents, built from four composable primitives: a five-plane decomposition (a reasoning plane that adjudicates intent, and four enforcement planes – network, identity, endpoint, data – that realize the decision), stop-anywhere mediation, composite principals with capability attenuation, and audit as a structured evidence substrate. We define a taxonomy of six interruption primitives that generalize allow and deny, state and argue for four correctness invariants, and demonstrate the foreclosure of seven production-agent threats across five concrete workflows. A reference implementation of the policy-engine core supplies measured evidence: attenuation correctness and evidence reconstructability hold on every trial, adjudication runs in single-digit microseconds, and the audit substrate's tamper-evidence behaves exactly as designed. We are explicit about scope: the architecture governs delegated action, not model behavior, and a full-system evaluation against a live agent benchmark is the invited next step.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

PASQA: Pitch-Accent-Focused Speech Quality Assessment Model Trained on Synthetic Speech with Accent Errors

Existing mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models typically predict utterance-level naturalness MOS and can be insensitive to localized pitch-accent errors. We propose Pitch-Accent-focused Speech Quality Assessment (PASQA), which explicitly targets pitch-accent correctness. To train our model, we construct a controlled Japanese accent-error dataset by changing accent patterns using an accent-controllable text-to-speech system, and compute a pseudo accent-quality score from the accent-error rate. PASQA builds on self-supervised representations and employs mora-conditioned fusion, ranking loss, an auxiliary accent-error localization task, and speaker-invariant training. Experiments show that conventional models fail to preserve the ordering by accent-error severity, whereas PASQA achieves high ordering accuracy on both seen and unseen speakers. Further, PASQA shows stronger agreement with human accent-correctness judgments. The code is available at https://github.com/lycorp-jp/PASQA.

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

Manifold Bandits: Bayesian Curriculum Learning over the Latent Geometry of Large Language Models

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central approach for improving reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), where training efficiency depends critically on how problems are sampled during optimization. Existing adaptive curriculum learning methods typically prioritize prompts of intermediate difficulty, treating problem selection as a standard bandit problem with independent arms and overlooking the structured, heterogeneous nature of the task space. In this work, we frame problem sampling as a manifold-structured bandit problem with endogenous non-stationarity: problems are related through the model's latent representation space, and sampling decisions can steer how learning signals evolve across that space. To operationalize this perspective, we introduce Bayesian Manifold Curriculum (BMC), a structure-aware framework that organizes problems into a hierarchical task tree and applies Bayesian learning to guide sampling. Empirically, we find that different sampling strategies induce non-trivial tradeoffs between productivity (learning signal), diversity (coverage of the task manifold), and utility (evaluation relevance). These results show that prioritizing difficulty alone is insufficient for strong downstream performance, highlighting the importance of incorporating structure and type-awareness into problem sampling.

16.
Science (Express) 2026-04-16

Protein-templated synthesis of dinucleotide repeat DNA by an antiphage reverse transcriptase | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) are widespread bacterial anti-phage systems that use unconventional mechanisms of polynucleotide synthesis. We show that DRT3, which comprises two distinct RTs (Drt3a and Drt3b) and a noncoding RNA (ncRNA), synthesizes alternating poly(GT/AC) double-stranded DNA. Cryo–electron microscopy structures at 2.6 Å resolution reveal a D3-symmetric 6:6:6 complex of Drt3a, Drt3b, and ncRNA. Drt3a produces the poly(GT) strand using a conserved ACACAC template within the ncRNA. Notably, Drt3b synthesizes a complementary, protein-primed poly(AC) strand in the complete absence of a nucleic acid template, using conserved active site residues specific to Drt3b to enforce precise base alternation. These findings expand the functional landscape of nucleic acid polymerases, revealing a protein-templated mechanism for sequence-specific DNA synthesis.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Vacuum photon emission and mean electromagnetic field in pair-creating external backgrounds

arXiv:2606.12547v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a perturbative description of vacuum radiative processes in quantum electrodynamics with a prescribed external electromagnetic background capable of producing electron-positron pairs. Since the initial vacuum is then unstable and the in- and out-vacua are inequivalent, radiative observables require a real-time formulation beyond the ordinary in-out approach of vacuum-stable QED. Using the Keldysh-Schwinger-Fradkin nonequilibrium technique, we derive the mean number density of emitted photons through the second nonvanishing order in the fine-structure constant. The leading term, of order $\alpha$, reproduces the known vertex and tadpole mechanisms, while the complete order-$\alpha^2$ correction contains interference, loop, and induced-current contributions. We also give an independent derivation based on the spectral decomposition of the identity operator in the in-Fock space, where the photon number density is represented as a sum of squared transition amplitudes and vacuum-disconnected terms are canceled by the optical theorem generalized to an unstable vacuum. In addition, we compute the mean electromagnetic field through order $e^3$, including the electromagnetic dressing of the induced vacuum current, and verify it using the corresponding Schwinger-Dyson equations. The final formulas are expressed in terms of exact solutions and propagators of the Dirac equation in the external background and apply to general spacetime-dependent field configurations.

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

The Initial Exploration Problem in Knowledge Graph Exploration

arXiv:2602.21066v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge Graphs (KGs) enable the integration and representation of complex information across domains, but their semantic richness and structural complexity create substantial barriers for lay users without expertise in semantic web technologies. When encountering an unfamiliar KG, such users face a distinct orientation challenge: they do not know what questions are possible, how the knowledge is structured, or how to begin exploration. This paper identifies and theorises this phenomenon as the Initial Exploration Problem (IEP). Drawing on theories from information behaviour and human-computer interaction, including ASK, exploratory search, information foraging, and cognitive load theory, we develop a conceptual framing of the IEP characterised by three interdependent barriers: scope uncertainty, ontology opacity, and query incapacity. We argue that these barriers converge at the moment of first contact, distinguishing the IEP from related concepts that presuppose an existing starting point or information goal. Analysing KG exploration interfaces at the level of interaction primitives, we suggest that many systems rely on epistemic assumptions that do not hold at first contact. This reveals a structural gap in the design space: the absence of interaction primitives for scope revelation, mechanisms that communicate what a KG contains without requiring users to formulate queries or interpret ontological structures. In articulating the IEP, this paper provides a theoretical lens for evaluating KG interfaces and for designing entry-point scaffolding that supports initial exploration.

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

Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward

arXiv:2602.00845v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning enables large reasoning models (LRMs) to dynamically acquire external knowledge, but yet optimizing the retrieval process remains challenging due to the lack of dense, principled reward signals. In this paper, we introduce InfoReasoner, a unified framework that incentivizes effective information seeking via a synthetic semantic information gain reward. Theoretically, we redefine information gain as uncertainty reduction over the model's belief states, establishing guarantees, including non-negativity, telescoping additivity, and channel monotonicity. Practically, to enable scalable optimization without manual retrieval annotations, we propose an output-aware intrinsic estimator that computes information gain directly from the model's output distributions using semantic clustering via bidirectional textual entailment. This intrinsic reward guides the policy to maximize epistemic progress, enabling efficient training via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments across seven question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that InfoReasoner consistently outperforms strong retrieval-augmented baselines, achieving up to 5.4% average accuracy improvement. Our work provides a theoretically grounded and scalable path toward agentic reasoning with retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/dl-m9/InfoReasoner

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

Granularity-Regulated Adaptive Computational Efficiency for Optimal Verification in Test-Time Scaling

Test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by investing additional compute at inference time. A central component of TTS is the verifier, which selects or scores candidate solutions to guide the search process. While prior work has explored the benefit of verification, a fundamental question remains underexplored: what is the optimal granularity of verification under a given compute budget? Coarse-grained outcome reward models (ORMs) and fine-grained process reward models (PRMs) represent two extremes, yet neither alone achieves compute-optimality across all regimes. In this paper, we establish a unified theoretical framework, called GRACE (\underline{G}ranularity-\underline{R}egulated \underline{A}daptive \underline{C}omputational \underline{E}fficiency), that characterizes the optimal verification granularity as an explicit function of problem difficulty, verifier accuracy, and compute budget. We prove that there exists a phase transition: fine-grained verification dominates when either the compute budget is large or the problem is hard, whereas coarse-grained verification is preferred in the low-budget, easy-problem regime. Our theory unifies Best-of-$N$, beam search, and step-level MCTS within a single Pareto-optimality framework, and motivates an adaptive granularity strategy that provably achieves the compute-performance Pareto frontier. Empirical results on MATH-500, GSM8K, and AIME benchmarks corroborate all four theoretical claims, with our adaptive strategy outperforming fixed-granularity baselines by up to 3.1\% accuracy at matched compute.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Evolutionary Two-Stage Hyperparameter Optimization Strategies for Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.20442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) solve Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws into neural network training. However, their performance suffers from unstable convergence, training plateaus, and strong sensitivity to architectural and optimization hyperparameters due to the highly non-convex and multi-term structure of the physics-informed loss. In this setting, the outer-loop hyperparameter search is a noisy and black-box optimization problem over heterogeneous parameters, where classical local or gradient-based strategies are easily trapped in suboptimal regions. Evolutionary algorithms, with their population-based exploration and ability to handle mixed, non-differentiable search spaces, provide a more robust mechanism for discovering promising configurations. We propose and investigate a two-stage approach based on evolutionary algorithms that combines exploration and exploitation parts of PINNs training to improve solution accuracy and robustness under fixed computational budgets. In the first stage, we perform low-fidelity training runs with truncated epochs to rapidly screen candidate configurations, treating hyperparameter selection as a black-box outer-loop problem. In the second stage, only the most promising candidates are fully trained with standard gradient-based optimizers to refine the solution. Evaluated on three popular problems, namely Advection, Klein-Gordon and Helmholtz equations, our method consistently outperforms standard training and achieves significantly lower mean error within constrained computational resources.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MVAD: A Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal AI-Generated Video-Audio Detection

The rapid advancement of AI-generated multimodal video-audio content has raised significant concerns regarding information security and content authenticity. Existing synthetic video datasets predominantly focus on the visual modality alone, while the few incorporating audio are largely confined to facial deepfakes–a limitation that fails to address the expanding landscape of general multimodal AI-generated content and substantially impedes the development of trustworthy detection systems. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce the Multimodal Video-Audio Dataset (MVAD), the first comprehensive dataset specifically designed for detecting AI-generated multimodal video-audio content. Our dataset exhibits three key characteristics: (1) genuine multimodality with samples generated according to three realistic video-audio forgery patterns; (2) high perceptual quality achieved through diverse state-of-the-art generative models; and (3) comprehensive diversity spanning realistic and anime visual styles, four content categories (humans, animals, objects, and scenes), and four video-audio multimodal data types. Our dataset will be available at https://github.com/HuMengXue0104/MVAD.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LongWebBench: Evaluating Structural and Functional Webpage Generation in Long-Horizon Settings

arXiv:2606.17727v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promising progress in generating webpages from visual inputs, yet existing evaluations mainly focus on short, single-screen, and largely static webpages. We introduce LongWebBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-horizon webpage generation from both structural and functional perspectives. LongWebBench contains 490 real-world long webpages for structural fidelity evaluation and 507 goal-oriented interaction tasks over 129 webpages for functional evaluation. It employs two complementary protocols: a multi-dimensional VLM-based metric for assessing long-range structural coherence, and a DOM-augmented agent-based pipeline for end-to-end functional verification. We further examine the automatic evaluation protocols through human agreement analysis. Experiments with state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary VLMs under single-image and multi-image settings reveal that structural fidelity degrades as webpage length increases, while visually plausible generations often fail to support executable multi-step interactions. These results highlight the need to evaluate long webpage generation beyond visual similarity, with executable interaction as a core criterion. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zheny2751-dotcom/LongWebBench.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

HD-Prot: A Protein Language Model for Joint Sequence-Structure Modeling with Continuous Structure Tokens

arXiv:2512.15133v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Proteins inherently possess a consistent sequence-structure duality. The abundance of protein sequence data, which can be readily represented as discrete tokens, has driven fruitful developments in protein language models (pLMs). A key remaining challenge, however, is how to effectively integrate continuous structural knowledge into pLMs. Current methods often discretize protein structures to accommodate the language modeling framework, which inevitably results in the loss of fine-grained information and limits the performance potential of multimodal pLMs. In this paper, we argue that such concerns can be circumvented: a sequence-based pLM can be extended to incorporate the structure modality through continuous tokens, i.e., high-fidelity protein structure latents that avoid vector quantization. Specifically, we propose a hybrid diffusion protein language model, HD-Prot, which embeds a continuous-valued diffusion head atop a discrete pLM, enabling seamless operation with both discrete and continuous tokens for joint sequence-structure modeling. It captures inter-token dependencies across modalities through a unified absorbing diffusion process, and estimates per-token distributions via categorical prediction for sequences and continuous diffusion for structures. Extensive results demonstrate that HD-Prot achieves competitive performance in unconditional sequence-structure co-generation, motif-scaffolding, protein structure prediction, and inverse folding tasks. Furthermore, our method can perform on par with state-of-the-art multimodal pLMs, despite being developed under limited computational resources (i.e., less than one-tenth the budget for modality extension fine-tuning). It highlights the viability of simultaneously estimating categorical and continuous distributions within a unified language model architecture, offering a promising alternative direction for multimodal pLMs.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Peak-Based Nuclide Identification in HPGe $\gamma$-Spectrometry with Machine Learning and SHAP

arXiv:2606.14874v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-purity germanium gamma spectra often require time-consuming analyses from subject matter experts. Photopeaks within these spectra are carefully fitted and numerical methods are employed to assist with nuclide identification (NID) and quantification. Amending the list of nuclides identified by analysis software can be nontrivial. When many samples need to be analyzed, it is therefore challenging to make timely and correct decisions. Supervised machine-learning-based NID can serve as an expert-informed, automated tool to improve the initial set of radionuclides suggested to an analyst and more effectively drive subsequent quantification. To that end, we implemented machine learning models that map photopeaks carefully fitted by analysts to NID results for experimental spectra containing various isotopic combinations drawn from a set of 65 isotopes. The best model achieved an F1 score of 0.97, markedly surpassing the F1 score of 0.84 achieved by traditional software when compared using a nuclide library comprising the same 65 isotopes assessed by the models. Finally, we illustrated the most important input features for model predictions using Shapley Additive Explanations. These explanations revealed that the models use physically relevant photopeaks when making predictions for the isotopes in our nuclide library.