Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

An Empirical Study on Learning Latent Representations for Emotional Speech Synthesis

For the last couple of years, the field of speech synthesis has improved dramatically thanks to deep learning. There are more and more deep learning-based TTS systems developed to make it possible to produce voices with high intelligibility and naturalness. Meanwhile, controlling the expressiveness is yet a big deal, generating speech in different styles or manners has received a lot of attention from community recently. This paper aims to give our solutions to deal with the task emotional speech synthesis (ESS) at VLSP 2022 which allows to generate humanlike natural-sounding voice from a given input text with desired emotional expression. By integrating speaker embedding, prosody bottleneck into FastSpeech 2, our systems can promisingly generate emotional speech of a single speaker (Sub-task 1), transfer speaking styles from another speaker to the target speaker with neutral non-expressive data while retaining the target speaker's identity (Sub-task 2).

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General-Capability Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2510.21978v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning and has become a standard post-training paradigm for contemporary language and vision-language models. However, the RLVR recipe introduces a significant risk of capability regression, in which models forget foundational skills after prolonged training without employing regularization strategies. We empirically confirm this concern, observing that open-source reasoning models suffer performance degradation on core capabilities such as perception and faithfulness. While imposing regularization terms like KL divergence can help prevent deviation from the base model, these terms are computed on the current task and therefore do not guarantee preservation of broader knowledge. Meanwhile, commonly used experience replay across heterogeneous domains makes it nontrivial to decide how much training emphasis each objective should receive. To address this, we propose RECAP-a replay strategy with dynamic objective reweighting for general knowledge preservation. Our reweighting mechanism adapts online using short-horizon signals of convergence and instability, shifting the post-training focus away from saturated objectives and toward underperforming or volatile ones. Our method is end-to-end and readily applicable to existing RLVR pipelines without training additional models or heavy tuning. Extensive experiments on benchmarks using Qwen2.5-VL-3B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which not only preserves general capabilities but also improves reasoning by enabling more flexible trade-offs among in-task rewards.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Statistical Foundations of LLM-based A/B Testing: A Surrogacy Framework for Human Causal Inference

arXiv:2606.17165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Organizations and researchers show increasing interest in using large language models (LLMs) in place of human participants in A/B tests, in the hope of experimenting faster and at lower cost. We study when a treatment effect estimated on LLM outcomes recovers the effect that would have been measured on the human population of interest. Distributional equivalence between LLM and human outcomes would make any standard estimator valid but is unrealistic. We therefore develop a statistical framework that adapts surrogate endpoint theory to LLMs. The framework shows that calibrating LLM outcomes to human outcomes identifies the average treatment effect under surrogacy and comparability conditions that are jointly weaker than distributional equivalence. When these conditions fail, the effect of interest is only partially identified, and we provide diagnostics that can falsify surrogacy on historical experiments together with a bound on the worst-case bias from limited overlap. We further show that the stochasticity inherent to LLMs introduces both bias and variance, but using an average of multiple draws as the surrogate mitigates both. We illustrate the methods and theory in simulations and an application to A/B tests on Upworthy headlines. A central takeaway from our work is that the validity of LLM outcomes as surrogates can only be falsified for past treatments and never verified for new ones, so human experiments remain indispensable for novel interventions. We discuss the role of LLM choice, prompting, and temperature as design variables, and how to size human experiments for validation.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Composite Activation Function for Learning Stable Binary Representations

arXiv:2605.11558v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation functions play a central role in neural networks by shaping internal representations. Recently, learning binary activation representations has attracted significant attention due to their advantages in computational and memory efficiency, as well as interpretability. However, training neural networks with Heaviside activations remains challenging, as their non-differentiability obstructs standard gradient-based optimization. In this paper, we propose Heavy Tailed Activation Function (HTAF), a smooth approximation to the Heaviside function that enables stable training with gradient-based optimization. We construct HTAF as a sigmoid hyperbolic tangent composite function and theoretically show that it maintains a large gradient mass around zero inputs while exhibiting slower gradient decay in the tail regions. We show that Spiking Neural Networks, Binary Neural Networks and Deep Heaviside neural Networks can be trained stably using HTAF with gradient-based optimization. Finally, we introduce Implicit Concept Bottleneck Models (ICBMs), an interpretable image model that leverages HTAF to induce discrete feature representations. Extensive experiments across various architectures and image datasets demonstrate that ICBM enables stable discretization while achieving prediction performance comparable to or better than standard models.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Semantic Robustness Certification for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are now widely used in downstream tasks. However, real-world applications often expose VLMs to distribution shifts induced by semantic variation (e.g., shape, size, and style). Robustness certification determines if a model's prediction changes when transformations are applied to its input. While most certification frameworks study geometric or pixel-level transformations over inputs, this work proposes a novel framework that enables certifying VLM robustness under semantic-level transformations. Leveraging the open-vocabulary capability of VLMs, we use text prompts as semantic proxies to construct transformations parameterized by an extent that controls the degree of semantic variation. By characterizing the VLM decision boundary in closed form, our framework quantitatively certifies extent intervals for which the predicted class remains unchanged under the semantic transformation. Our framework is the first to certify VLM robustness under semantic-level variations without requiring additional data for each variation, making it practical to apply. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that our framework enables certifying robustness under diverse semantic variations across scenarios.

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

World Tracing: Generative Pixel-Aligned Geometry Beyond the Visible

Image-to-3D methods often trade off faithfulness and completeness: depth estimators are anchored to input pixels but stop at the visible surface, while image-to-3D models generate complete shapes that are often misaligned with the input. We introduce World Tracing, a generative pixel-aligned geometry representation that predicts 3D points aligned with observed pixels while completing geometry beyond the visible surface. For each input pixel, World Tracing predicts an ordered stack of camera-space 3D points, where the first layer represents the visible surface and subsequent layers represent front-to-back intersections with occluded surfaces. We instantiate this representation with a world-tracing diffusion transformer, WT-DiT, which treats multiple geometry layers as separate denoising tokens coupled through factorized and global attention. WT-DiT is trained with pixel-space flow matching and a mixed noise schedule that balances visible-surface reconstruction with occluded-geometry generation. World Tracing achieves strong performance on visible-surface reconstruction and complete geometry generation across object, scene, and dynamic benchmarks, outperforming both depth predictors and image-to-3D generators. It also preserves 2D-to-3D correspondence, enabling text-driven 3D scene editing, geometry-conditioned novel-view video synthesis, and training-free integration with textured-mesh generators.

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

Debate2Create: Robot Co-design via Multi-Agent LLM Debate

arXiv:2510.25850v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Debate2Create (D2C), a multi-agent LLM framework that formulates robot co-design as structured, iterative debate grounded in physics-based evaluation. A design agent and control agent engage in a thesis-antithesis-synthesis loop, while criterion-specific LLM judges provide multi-objective feedback to steer exploration. Across five MuJoCo locomotion benchmarks, D2C achieves the highest default-normalized score among the evaluated LLM-based and black-box baselines, with gains up to 3.2x on Ant and nearly 9x on Swimmer. Iterative debate yields 18-35% gains over compute-matched zero-shot generation, and D2C-generated rewards transfer to default morphologies in 4/5 tasks. These results suggest that structured, simulator-grounded multi-agent interaction is a useful mechanism for joint morphology-reward optimization under a fixed-topology, per-candidate-RL protocol. Project page: debate2create.github.io.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Fast LLM-Based Semantic Filtering: From a Unified Framework to an Adaptive Two-Phase Method

arXiv:2606.08090v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating a natural-language yes/no predicate over a document corpus under an accuracy target - the semantic filter - is a cornerstone of LLM-based data processing. Calling the LLM on every document (the oracle) is prohibitive, so cascades pair the oracle with a fast proxy. As deployed today, they leave four limitations on the table. (1) Each cascade family - model-free clustering, prebuilt small-LLM proxies, online-trained proxies - commits to a single representation and pipeline, and wins on only a narrow query regime. (2) The strongest online proxy invests in a custom training scheme on a bi-encoder over dense embeddings, missing the token-level evidence richer predicates require. (3) The proxy is trained against binary yes/no labels, wasting the LLM's per-document confidence at the boundary documents it most needs to learn. (4) Existing calibrations add a uniform safety margin, conflating genuine proxy uncertainty with small-sample noise and inflating cascade cost. We address these by (1) composing families adaptively - model-free clustering first, online proxy only when needed, with oracle calls shared across phases; (2) replacing the cosine bi-encoder with a hybrid of off-the-shelf token-aware models; (3) training the proxy with the oracle's per-document confidence as a soft label; and (4) a calibration that adds the safety margin only where the labeled sample is sparse. We are also the first to use the oracle's per-document confidence for three purposes: a query-level difficulty compass, a lower bound on the minimum oracle calls any proxy-based cascade can make, and the proxy's soft training label. At a 90% accuracy target on three 10K-document corpora, our methods are 1.6-2.0x faster than the best prior method per corpus and meet the target on 95% of queries; the BER-derived lower bound indicates a further ~4-20x of headroom for future work.

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

SIGMA: Search-Augmented On-Demand Knowledge Integration for Agentic Mathematical Reasoning

Solving mathematical reasoning problems requires not only accurate access to relevant knowledge but also careful, multi-step thinking. However, current retrieval-augmented models often rely on a single perspective, follow inflexible search strategies, and struggle to effectively combine information from multiple sources. We introduce SIGMA (Search-Augmented On-Demand Knowledge Integration for AGentic Mathematical reAsoning), a unified framework that orchestrates specialized agents to independently reason, perform targeted searches, and synthesize findings through a moderator mechanism. Each agent generates hypothetical passages to optimize retrieval for its analytic perspective, ensuring knowledge integration is both context-sensitive and computation-efficient. When evaluated on challenging benchmarks such as MATH500, AIME, and PhD-level science QA GPQA, SIGMA consistently outperforms both open- and closed-source systems, achieving an absolute performance improvement of 7.4%. Our results demonstrate that multi-agent, on-demand knowledge integration significantly enhances both reasoning accuracy and efficiency, offering a scalable approach for complex, knowledge-intensive problem-solving. We will release the code upon publication.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Spatially Stratified Distillation for Heterogeneous Radar Place Recognition

Scalable, all-weather place recognition increasingly relies on heterogeneous radar place recognition to bridge diverse hardware platforms. A notable application is matching queries from cost-effective 4D automotive radars against high-fidelity reference maps built by dense spinning radars. This process is fundamentally limited by the extreme sparsity (and narrow field-of-view) of the 4D sensor, which captures only a fraction of the structural density present in the spinning radar database. Prior efforts address this issue by unifying different radar signals. That is, projecting both signals into a common representational space. Yet, they suffer performance degradation in multi-session environments. In this paper, we propose spatially-stratified distillation (SSD); a strategy that replaces standard uniform distillation with an asymmetric spatial alignment derived directly from physical radar returns. In regions where both radars exhibit overlapping returns, SSD enforces strong feature alignment. Crucially, in sparse regions where the 4D student lacks returns but the teacher contains valid structure within the shared field of view, SSD applies heavily discounted distillation weights. Extensive evaluations of the recent HeRCULES dataset demonstrate that SSD significantly outperforms prior place recognition methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on its challenging dynamic sequences.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Epiblast diversification and blood formation in a human pregastrula

Authors:

The incipient stage of gastrulation in human, when the primitive streak is about to emerge, represents a critical yet underexplored period. Here we present the high-resolution spatial transcriptomic landscape of a human embryo at Carnegie stage 6 (approximately 13–14 days post-conception), a stage at which primitive streak remains invisible and gastrulation-derived mesodermal/endodermal progenitors are not yet transcriptomically detected. We identified an anterior visceral endoderm-like hypoblast population, as well as a trifurcated developmental trajectory of the epiblast, progressing towards the amnion, primitive streak and node/prechordal plate/notochord (axial mesoderm) at subsequent developmental stages1–3. Furthermore, our findings challenge the existing paradigms by revealing that primitive haematopoiesis, involving three blood lineages, initiates in human yolk sac before gastrulation, earlier than previously recognized2,4–7, and that the first blood cells arise from the extra-embryonic mesoderm with a hypoblast rather than epiblast origin. Notably, we identified two spatial zones, each consisting of molecularly distinct yolk sac endoderm and extra-embryonic mesoderm populations, that respectively facilitated the generation of erythro-megakaryocytic lineages and myeloid precursors. These findings provide insights into the onset of gastrulation and the earliest blood formation in humans, with profound implications for advancing stem cell-derived human embryo models and in vitro blood regeneration. High-resolution spatial transcriptome analysis of a human embryo at Carnegie stage 6 reveals three distinct developmental trajectories from the epiblast towards amnion, primitive streak and axial mesoderm, and detects the initiation of haematopoiesis before gastrulation, originating from hypoblast rather than epiblast.

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

Stealthy World Model Manipulation via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2606.18697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based learning agents use learned world models to predict future states, plan actions, and adapt to new environments. However, the process of updating world models from collected experience creates a training-time attack surface: adversarially poisoned fine-tuning trajectories can manipulate the learned dynamics and thereby corrupt downstream planning. In this paper, we propose SWAAP, the first two-stage data poisoning framework for learned world models. In the first stage, SWAAP identifies a harmful target world model that induces low-return behavior under planning while remaining close to clean dynamics, using first-order bilevel optimization enabled by a transition-gradient theorem. In the second stage, SWAAP realizes this target through stealth-constrained gradient matching, modifying only a limited fraction of fine-tuning transition targets so that the induced training gradients steer the victim model toward the adversarial target, while a prediction-error regularizer encourages the poisoned targets to remain close to the world model's natural approximation error. To assess attack stealthiness, we evaluate defenses and detectability across three stages of the poisoning pipeline: pre-training detection of poisoned transitions, robust training during fine-tuning, and test-time monitoring of the resulting world model. Across diverse continuous-control tasks, SWAAP causes substantial performance degradation while keeping poisoned transitions close to clean data and evading the evaluated non-adaptive residual/CUSUM/TRIM-style defenses. These results reveal a practical vulnerability in world-model adaptation pipelines and highlight the need for robustness methods that protect both world-model training data and learned dynamics.

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

BayLing-Duplex: Native Full-Duplex Speech Dialogue with a Single Autoregressive LLM

Real-time, full-duplex speech interaction is a key feature of next-generation spoken chatbots, allowing the model to listen and speak at the same time and to handle natural phenomena such as overlap, hesitation, and barge-in. Existing speech language models (SpeechLMs) such as LLaMA-Omni and GLM-4-Voice are still turn-based and rely on an external Voice Activity Detection (VAD) module to mark the end of the user's turn, which fundamentally limits their interactive ability. In this paper, we introduce BayLing-Duplex, a native full-duplex SpeechLM where a single autoregressive LLM decides when to listen, when to speak, and when to stop, with no auxiliary turn-taking module. The design adds only a few special tokens to the standard vocabulary, so it transfers across LLMs and reuses existing training and serving stacks with no architectural adaptation. Starting from the public GLM-4-Voice checkpoint and using only 400K full-duplex samples for fine-tuning followed by a lightweight DPO stage, BayLing-Duplex reaches 92% turn-taking success and 100% interruption success on InstructS2S-Eval, while improving the speech-response score from 2.17 to 3.39 over Moshi. BayLing-Duplex also matches or surpasses its turn-based counterpart on Llama Questions, Web Questions, and Alpaca-Eval, showing that simultaneous listen-and-speak modeling does not sacrifice response quality.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

VGPT-RSI for RH-Adjacent Formal Progress: Boundary Certificates, Verified Finite Lagarias Inequalities, and Explicit Failure Localization

arXiv:2606.15096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Riemann Hypothesis remains one of the central unsolved problems in mathematics. Rather than claiming proof, we investigate whether a verifiable AI-assisted reasoning system can produce reliable, formally checked partial progress while explicitly identifying the remaining mathematical obstructions. We apply the Verifiable Growing Physical Transformer with Recursive Self-Improvement (VGPT-RSI) to two RH-adjacent certification tasks. First, we construct and verify a finite RH-boundary certificate for inequality on a parameterized safe lower curve over a region. The numerical boundary curve is converted into a certificate-backed lower curve, audited using outward-rounded interval arithmetic and Arb/FLINT ball arithmetic, and then checked in Rocq/CoqInterval for the parameterized theorem. Second, we initiate a formal Lagarias-route certificate. Lagarias criterion states that RH is equivalent to the global inequality. We formalize the finite quantity and produce a Coq-checked finite certificate. The final system identifies the exact unresolved mathematical bottlenecks: formalizing the Lagarias equivalence, proving the global tail theorem beyond any finite cutoff, and potentially reducing counterexamples to colossally abundant or related extremal integers. These results demonstrate that VGPT-RSI can produce certified RH-adjacent formal progress, organize proof dependencies, and avoid overclaiming when the remaining obstruction is genuinely mathematical.

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

GOT-JEPA: Generic Object Tracking with Model Adaptation and Occlusion Handling using Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture

The human visual system tracks objects by integrating current observations with previously observed information, adapting to target and scene changes, and reasoning about occlusion at fine granularity. In contrast, recent generic object trackers are often optimized for training targets, which limits robustness and generalization in unseen scenarios, and their occlusion reasoning remains coarse, lacking detailed modeling of occlusion patterns. To address these limitations in generalization and occlusion perception, we propose GOT-JEPA, a model-predictive pretraining framework that extends JEPA from predicting image features to predicting tracking models. Given identical historical information, a teacher predictor generates pseudo-tracking models from a clean current frame, and a student predictor learns to predict the same pseudo-tracking models from a corrupted version of the current frame. This design provides stable pseudo supervision and explicitly trains the predictor to produce reliable tracking models under occlusions, distractors, and other adverse observations, improving generalization to dynamic environments. Building on GOT-JEPA, we further propose OccuSolver to enhance occlusion perception for object tracking. OccuSolver adapts a point-centric point tracker for object-aware visibility estimation and detailed occlusion-pattern capture. Conditioned on object priors iteratively generated by the tracker, OccuSolver incrementally refines visibility states, strengthens occlusion handling, and produces higher-quality reference labels that progressively improve subsequent model predictions. Extensive evaluations on seven benchmarks show that our method effectively enhances tracker generalization and robustness.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Asymptotic analysis of the normal inverse Gaussian cumulative distribution

Authors:

arXiv:2509.05664v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Using a recently derived integral in terms of elementary functions, we derive new asymptotic expansions of the normal inverse Gaussian cumulative distribution function. One of the asymptotic representations is in terms of the normal Gaussian distribution or complementary error function.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Attention Expansion: Enhancing Keyphrase Extraction from Long Documents with Attention-Augmented Contextualized Embeddings

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved strong performance in keyphrase extraction (KPE), largely due to their ability to generate rich contextualized representations. However, long-document KPE remains challenging because salient keyphrase evidence may be scattered across distant document sections that cannot be jointly captured within the limited context window of most PLMs. Although long-context large language models (LLMs) can process broader textual contexts, their computational cost limits their practicality for efficient and high-throughput KPE. To overcome this limitation, we propose an attention expansion mechanism that augments PLM token representations with information from surrounding out-of-context chunks using pre-trained word embeddings. The proposed mechanism expands the effective contextual scope of PLM-based KPE models without requiring full-document attention or expensive LLM-based inference. We evaluate our approach across five PLM backbones, including general-purpose, scientific, task-specific, and long-context encoders, using two training regimes and five benchmark corpora from scientific and news domains. Experimental results demonstrate that attention expansion consistently enhances KPE performance across all evaluation settings, outperforming state-of-the-art models and yielding notable improvements in F1 score. The improvements extend to domain-specific, task-specialized, and native long-context models, showing that the proposed mechanism provides complementary information rather than merely compensating for limited input length. These results establish attention expansion as an efficient and effective strategy for long-document KPE.

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

Visual enhancement and 3D representation for underwater scenes: a review

Underwater visual enhancement (UVE) and underwater 3D reconstruction pose significant challenges in computer vision and AI-based tasks due to complex imaging conditions in aquatic environments. Despite the development of numerous enhancement algorithms, a comprehensive and systematic review covering both UVE and underwater 3D reconstruction remains absent. To advance research in these areas, we present an in-depth review from multiple perspectives. First, we introduce the fundamental physical models, highlighting the peculiarities that challenge conventional techniques. We survey advanced methods for visual enhancement and 3D reconstruction specifically designed for underwater scenarios. The paper assesses various approaches from non-learning methods to advanced data-driven techniques, including Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting, discussing their effectiveness in handling underwater distortions. Finally, we conduct both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of state-of-the-art UVE and underwater 3D reconstruction algorithms across multiple benchmark datasets. Finally, we highlight key research directions for future advancements in underwater vision.

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

Understanding Diversity Collapse in RLVR via the Lens of Overtraining

arXiv:2606.15455v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a key approach for enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, RLVR often suffers from diversity collapse: Pass@$1$ improves while high-$k$ Pass@$k$ degrades, which is viewed as a narrowing of the model's reasoning boundary. We formalize this diversity collapse through the lens of overtraining: once a problem's contribution to the reference metric has effectively saturated, further updates no longer expand what the model can solve but still concentrate probability mass on the trajectories favored by on-policy sampling. Under a standard setup with few rollouts per problem, even a single observed success places a problem in a nearly saturated regime for high-$k$ Pass@$k$, so most updates in standard RLVR are overtraining from the boundary perspective. This perspective also suggests a reading of whether RLVR can expand the model's reasoning abilities beyond the base model: since RLVR is structurally biased against high-$k$ Pass@$k$, its aggregate decline does not by itself mean that no new reasoning gains occurred. Interventionally, restricting updates to problems with zero observed success lifts Pass@$256$ above the base model on difficult benchmarks; observationally, a non-trivial fraction of initially unsolvable problems become solvable during standard RLVR training. Building on these findings, we propose Bayesian Boundary Gating (BBG), which redirects optimization away from overtraining by estimating each problem's marginal contribution to the reasoning boundary. Across multiple reasoning benchmarks, BBG improves average Pass@$k$ across a wide range of $k$.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Hierarchical Successor Representation for Robust Transfer

arXiv:2602.12753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The successor representation (SR) provides a powerful framework for decoupling predictive dynamics from rewards, enabling rapid generalisation across reward configurations. However, the classical SR is limited by its inherent policy dependence: policies change due to ongoing learning, environmental non-stationarities, and changes in task demands, making established predictive representations obsolete. Furthermore, in topologically complex environments, SRs suffer from spectral diffusion, leading to dense and overlapping features that scale poorly. Here we propose the Hierarchical Successor Representation (HSR) for overcoming these limitations. By incorporating temporal abstractions into the construction of predictive representations, HSR learns stable state features which are robust to task-induced policy changes. Applying non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) to the HSR yields a sparse, low-rank state representation that facilitates highly sample-efficient transfer to novel tasks in multi-compartmental environments. Further analysis reveals that HSR-NMF discovers interpretable topological structures, providing a policy-agnostic hierarchical map that effectively bridges model-free optimality and model-based flexibility. Beyond providing a useful basis for task-transfer, we show that HSR's temporally extended predictive structure can also be leveraged to drive efficient exploration, effectively scaling to large, procedurally generated environments.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Algebraic Diversity: Single-Copy Density Matrix Estimation via Group-Structured Measurements

arXiv:2604.03725v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We extend the algebraic diversity (AD) framework from classical signal processing to quantum measurement theory. The Quantum Algebraic Diversity (QAD) Theorem establishes that a group-structured positive operator-valued measure (POVM) applied to a single copy of a quantum state produces a full-rank, group-averaged density matrix estimator whose eigenbasis and eigenvalue ordering track those of the true density matrix, with a bias toward the symmetrized state, analogous to the classical recovery of covariance eigenstructure from a single observation. We establish a Classical-Quantum Duality Map connecting classical covariance estimation to quantum state tomography, and an Optimality Inheritance Theorem showing that classical group optimality transfers to quantum settings via the Born map within the group-averaged family. SIC-POVMs are identified as AD with the Heisenberg-Weyl group and mutually unbiased bases as AD with the Clifford group, revealing the hierarchy $\mathrm{HW}(d) \subseteq \mathcal{C}(d) \subseteq S_d$ that mirrors the classical $\mathbb{Z}_M \subseteq G_{\min} \subseteq S_M$. The double-commutator eigenvalue theorem gives polynomial-time adaptive POVM selection. A worked qubit example shows the group-averaged estimator from a single computational-basis measurement, averaged over a matched $\mathbb{Z}_2$ group, reaching fidelity 0.99 where standard single-basis tomography gives a rank-1 estimate of fidelity 0.80. Monte Carlo simulations for $d = 2$ to $13$ confirm fidelity above 0.90 from a single outcome while standard fidelity degrades as $\sim 1/d$. The growing ratio reflects collapse of the rank-1 standard estimator, not fewer copies per parameter: the biased single-copy estimator reduces the number of distinct measurement settings, not the per-parameter sampling cost, and a genuine copy reduction holds only under exact symmetry.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A Privacy-Preserving Framework Using Remote Data Science for Inter-Institutional Student Retention Prediction

arXiv:2606.12845v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study explores privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) techniques using the PySyft platform to enable collaborative prediction of student retention between institutions. We developed a remote data science (RDS) framework with a semi-air-gapped architecture consisting of high-side and low-side servers, allowing researchers from three universities to build predictive models on sensitive student data without direct data access. Using historical data from a small private university (N=720), we evaluated three synthetic data generation approaches and validated the framework through inter-institutional collaboration. The results demonstrate consistent classification performance across institutions (Macro F1: 0.690–0.695) while maintaining strict Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) compliance. We also propose Data-Type-Aware Templates, a novel synthetic data method that prioritizes privacy over distributional fidelity. Our findings confirm that RDS-based PPML is technically feasible for educational settings and offers a practical alternative to federated learning for small-scale inter-institutional collaborations. The code is available at https://github.com/jtfields/NAIRR240195-Privacy-Preserving-Machine-Learning.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Variational Graph Neural Networks for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems

arXiv:2603.29515v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasingly wide use of deep machine learning techniques in computational mechanics has significantly accelerated simulations of problems that were considered unapproachable just a few years ago. However, in critical applications such as Digital Twins for engineering or medicine, fast responses are not enough; reliable results must also be provided. In certain cases, traditional deterministic methods may not be optimal as they do not provide a measure of confidence in their predictions or results, especially in inverse problems where the solution may not be unique or the initial data may not be entirely reliable due to the presence of noise, for instance. Classic deep neural networks also lack a clear measure to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions. In this work, we present a variational graph neural network (VGNN) architecture that integrates variational layers into its architecture to model the probability distribution of weights. Unlike computationally expensive full Bayesian networks, our approach strategically introduces variational layers exclusively in the decoder, allowing us to estimate cognitive uncertainty and statistical uncertainty at a relatively lower cost. In this work, we validate the proposed methodology in two cases of solid mechanics: the identification of the value of the elastic modulus with nonlinear distribution in a 2D elastic problem and the location and quantification of the loads applied to a 3D hyperelastic beam, in both cases using only the displacement field of each test as input data. The results show that the model not only recovers the physical parameters with high precision, but also provides confidence intervals consistent with the physics of the problem, as well as being able to locate the position of the applied load and estimate its value, giving a confidence interval for that experiment.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Compressing Image Style Training into a Single Model Forward

Diffusion-based style transfer must balance inference efficiency with stylization fidelity. Adapter-based methods are efficient, but they inject style as an external condition and can either weaken reference-specific appearance or copy reference semantics into the generated image. Optimization-based personalization methods such as LoRA internalize style more effectively, but require a separate training process for every new style. We introduce i2L (image-to-LoRA), a framework that amortizes style LoRA training into a single forward pass. Given one or more reference images, i2L predicts LoRA weights for a text-to-image model, enabling immediate style instantiation without per-style optimization. The architecture combines an image encoder, learnable LoRA queries, and compressed decoding heads that generate adapted matrices. Training on semantically diverse style pairs encourages the predictor to preserve appearance cues while suppressing reference-content copying. Experiments on Z-Image, FLUX.2, and Hidream-O1 show that i2L improves style fidelity, prompt alignment, and perceptual quality over existing baselines. Because i2L produces explicit LoRA weights, it also supports asymmetric classifier-free guidance, multi-reference style fusion, and composition with controllable-generation modules.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

AMaNITA: an end-to-end workflow for native tRNA nanopore sequencing data analysis

Transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules serve as essential adapters during protein translation. While direct RNA sequencing (DRS) via Oxford Nanopore Technologies has emerged as a powerful platform for systematic tRNAome profiling, we currently lack a simple and robust statistical framework for nanopore tRNA data analyses. Here, we address this gap by developing AMaNITA (Abundance, Modifications, and Nanopore Intensity Toolbox Application), an end-to-end bioinformatic workflow that enables simplified, robust, and scalable analyses of nanopore native tRNA sequencing datasets. AMaNITA streamlines the entire analytical trajectory: from upstream processing (basecalling, mapping, filtering, batch effect correction) to downstream assessment of differential tRNA abundance and modification stoichiometry. The workflow generates an interactive HTML report for data exploration and analysis, allowing the user to download the source data files and resulting plots. AMaNITA can be executed using Singularity from the command line, without requiring installation of dependencies.