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) 2026-06-17

L-Proto: Language-Aware Episodic Prototypical Training for Multilingual Speaker Verification

arXiv:2606.17416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual speaker verification remains challenging because language-dependent acoustic variability causes speaker identity to become entangled with linguistic characteristics, degrading generalization across languages. In multilingual training, embeddings often encode language cues with speaker identity, causing speakers to form language-specific clusters. We propose L-Proto, a language-aware episodic prototypical training strategy that constructs language-consistent episodes. By sampling speakers from a single language per episode, L-Proto reduces language-driven variation during training and encourages embeddings to focus more directly on speaker identity. Experiments on the TidyVoice Challenge benchmark demonstrate consistent performance improvements over conventional fine-tuning and random episodic sampling across multiple backbone architectures.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Reform of the intermediate level of the health system in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Adaptations and limits in the stabilization of the personnel of the Provincial Health Division: A cohort study.

Background: Human resources are one of the pillars of health systems. Since the World Health Organization's report on human resources issues, several countries have integrated this component into the various reforms aimed at strengthening their health systems. This study aims to explore the effects of reforming the intermediate level of a health system operating in a fragile state context. Methodology Our study was conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It was a cohort study of the staff of the 14 Provincial Health Divisions (PHD) out of the 26 existing in the DRC. We established a database of the staff of these 14 PHD from 2016, just after the implementation of the intermediate level reform and the allocation of this staff by the Ministry of Health. We did a recall in 2021, in each of these PHD to survey this staff through a structured questionnaire and supplemented by the files of the agents available in each PHD. Sociodemographic, economic and academic variables were collected and analyzed. Data were entered into an Excel 2016 database and processed with SPSS software version 25. The chi-square test was used for comparison of proportions with a statistical significance level of p < 0.05. Risk ratios ratios (RR) and their 95% confidence intervals were calculated as measures of association. The error threshold was set at 5%. Results A total of 657 agents with an average age of 45.2 years had been identified in 2016 at the start of the survey and in 2021, 118 or 18% of them were no longer part of the PHD agents. Among the causes of absence noted: 48% of agents placed on leave, 16% promoted to other functions within the health system, 16% desertion and dismissal and 11% cases of death. 19.8% of absentees are executives, 19.5% men against 10.3% women; 22.3% of absentees in unstable provinces against 16.6% in stable ones. The factors associated with the absence of agents in the PHD remain the reaching of retirement age [RR (95% CI) = 5.5 (1.2-24.9) ]and male agents [RR (95% CI) = 3.2 (1.3-7.9)]. Among the agents who remained, 92% kept their initial position, 6% were subject to an internal permutation accompanied by a promotion. The factors associated with the stability of human resources at the level of the Provincial Health Division are: female gender, manager with experience or seniority > 5 years, Age > 35 years, Stable province, Presence of a partner bonus. Conclusion Even in a crisis and fragile context, health system reform is possible. It is possible to organize staff recruitment through a selection process independent of the political authorities of the Ministry of Health and supported by the technical services of the Ministry and partners . Experience and the presence of a financial bonus are motivating factors for staff stability. The involvement of Technical and Financial Support Partners in the recruitment process helped the Ministry of Health to minimize political influence in the recruitment of middle-level executives.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Crossovers of Stabilizer Entropy Beyond Criticality

arXiv:2606.13810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stabilizer Rényi entropy has emerged as a probe of nonstabilizerness in quantum many-body systems, but its scaling structure beyond critical points remains poorly understood compared with entanglement entropy. Recent field-theory approaches indicate that stabilizer entropy contains universal critical data and boundary-sensitive terms, raising the question of how these structures extend into massive and crossover regimes. We address this problem for a broad class of finite-range spin chains at Rényi index one-half. We derive exact finite-size formulas for both full periodic chains and finite intervals of the infinite chain, making the universal crossover from critical to noncritical behavior analytically accessible. In periodic geometry, the entropy obeys a volume law away from criticality and exhibits a universal finite-size crossover controlled by the competition between system size and correlation length. We also show that the large-scale SRE density develops a cusp across the field-tuned critical line, while the XX endpoint is governed by a distinct scaling regime associated with the saturation point. In the subsystem geometry, the interval entropy separates bulk critical behavior from boundary contributions generated by the way the finite region cuts the infinite chain. The crossover from critical to massive behavior is then encoded in boundary constants and universal functions controlled by the correlation length. Through exact stabilizer-entropy correspondences, the scaling theory extends to internal XY reductions, Finite-range spin chains, and Cluster–Ising representatives. Our results provide an exact lattice benchmark for the emerging QFT description of stabilizer entropy beyond isolated conformal points.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Useful is Causal Invariance for Domain Adaptation in Finite-Sample Settings?

arXiv:2606.12680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models often degrade when they are deployed on a target distribution that differs from the source distributions they were trained on. Recent work in causality-based domain generalization has shown how shared causal structure between domains can induce invariant predictors, e.g., models on a subset of features which have stable risk across structured domain shifts. However, the extent to which such population-level causal invariances can lead to gains in finite-sample settings remains underexplored. In particular, in practice we often have access to a few labeled target samples, a setting called supervised domain adaptation (sDA). In this paper, we explore when (full or partial) causal knowledge can provably improve supervised domain adaptation. As a first step, we study linear regression, where full or partial causal knowledge specifies a collection of invariant or possibly invariant feature subsets, each yielding a source-trained candidate predictor. We derive matching upper and lower bounds showing that finite-sample gains are governed by the target-risk margins separating the candidates, together with the finite-source estimation error. When these margins are sufficiently large relative to $n_Q$, an adaptive aggregation procedure can match the best candidate predictor while avoiding negative transfer relative to target-only learning. On the other hand, when the margins are too small, no algorithm can reliably exploit the candidate collection to obtain faster finite-sample rates. We further connect these margins to structural shift magnitude in linear SCMs and validate the theory on real-world causal benchmarks.

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

Efficient Multinomial Logistic Bandit via Frequent Directions

arXiv:2606.11968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies efficient online algorithms for multinomial logistic bandits (MLogB), where the feedback distribution over $K+1$ outcomes follows a multinomial logistic model of $d$-dimensional action vectors. A representative UCB-type algorithm, OFUL-MLogB, achieves a regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(Kd\sqrt{T})$, but still requires $\mathcal{O}(K^3d^3)$ time and $\mathcal{O}(K^2d^2)$ space per round due to parameter estimation and optimistic reward construction, which is prohibitive in high-dimensional settings. To address this limitation, we propose EOFD-MLogB, which integrates frequent directions matrix sketching into OFUL-MLogB. By maintaining a low-rank SVD sketch of the accumulated Hessian, constrained online Newton updates in parameter estimation and $Kd \times K$ spectral-norm computations in the reward bonus are reduced to one-dimensional root-finding tasks and $K \times K$ eigenvalue computations, respectively. This yields dominant per-round time complexity $\mathcal{O}(Kd(m+K)^2)$ and space complexity $\mathcal{O}(Kd(m+K))$, where $m \ll d$ is the sketch size. We further prove a regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\Delta_T(Kd\ln\Delta_T+m)\sqrt{T})$, where the sketching error factor $\Delta_T$ is controlled by the $m$-truncated spectral tail of the Hessian. Thus, when the Hessian is approximately low-rank, the regret is close to that of OFUL-MLogB. Experiments validate the computational efficiency and competitive performance.

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

Acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable governing lung-nodule AI: kernel-driven measurement instability and noise-driven detection fragility, invisible to DICOM metadata

AI governance for medical imaging is formalizing: the 2026 ACR-SIIM Practice Parameter recommends local acceptance testing and ongoing drift monitoring, and the ACR Assess-AI registry monitors AI outputs using DICOM metadata for context. We argue that a necessary, currently unmonitored layer sits beneath output metrics: whether incoming studies remain within the acquisition envelope a model was validated on. Using a LUNA16-trained MONAI RetinaNet lung-nodule detector, we test whether acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable. On real paired CT differing only in reconstruction kernel (NLST B30f vs B80f), kernel alone shifted AI-measured diameter and flipped a Fleischner size category in 5.2% (8 of 155) of nodules at fixed patient and acquisition, while detection confidence was unchanged (Wilcoxon p=0.22). Under controlled LIDC-IDRI perturbations the effects dissociated by axis: the noise axis degraded detection confidence (p=5.9e-32, concentrated in nodules under 6 mm) but not measurement, while the frequency/kernel axis corrupted measurement (p=8.6e-13) but not detection. A 4-feature pixel fingerprint recovered reconstruction identity (patient-level AUC about 0.95 on real CT, 0.995 on a QIBA phantom) where the ConvolutionKernel DICOM tag was uninformative (identical labels across reconstructions). The kernel axis transported across four manufacturers (leave-one-vendor-out AUC 0.94-0.98, matching the within-vendor ceiling). Acquisition state thus maps to distinct AI failure modes, frequency content to measurement reliability and noise to detection sensitivity, and is not recoverable from metadata. Acquisition-aware, input-side validation is the missing layer for the acceptance-testing and drift-monitoring requirements now entering imaging-AI accreditation.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Identifiable Markov Switching Models with Instantaneous Effects and Exponential Families

arXiv:2606.02231v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Temporal systems often exhibit non-stationary behaviour, such as seasonal climate variation or glucose fluctuations in patients with type-1 diabetes. One way to model non-stationarity is through discrete latent regimes, i.e., stationary segments of time. Such systems induce a Markov Switching Model (MSM), a class of Hidden Markov Models with autoregressive dependencies among latent regimes and observed variables. Identifying latent regimes is challenging in the presence of frequent regime switches and nonlinear and non-Gaussian dynamics, particularly when there are instantaneous effects between the variables, e.g., due to slow rates of measurements. In this work, we establish the identifiability of both latent regimes and regime-dependent causal structures under temporal regime dependencies, nonlinear lagged and instantaneous effects, and independent noise from the exponential family. Our identifiability theory subsumes non-temporal mixtures of causal models. Furthermore, we introduce FlowMSM, a regime detection framework that can be paired with any stationary causal discovery method to recover regime-dependent causal structures. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and a financial economics dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to detect latent regimes and discover causal structures from non-stationary time series.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Epistemic Uncertainty Is Not the Reducible Kind

作者:

arXiv:2606.12646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The standard taxonomy of predictive uncertainty defines epistemic uncertainty as the part removable by collecting more data, while the standard measure identifies it with a mutual-information term. We prove the definition and the measure are extensionally inconsistent. On an explicit construction, the measure assigns all uncertainty to the epistemic class, yet no quantity of training data reduces it. Reducibility is instead a property of the pair (uncertainty, acquisition class), and the dichotomy resolves into three parts: aleatoric, sample-reducible epistemic, and mechanism-reducible epistemic uncertainty. An exact identity for the value of an observation shows that in-distribution data never reduces mechanism-irreducible uncertainty and generically increases it. Ensemble disagreement, the deployed epistemic estimate, tracks the training procedure rather than the epistemic term. It collapses to zero beneath a positive truth under consistent training, and equals hyperparameter-scaled initialization noise under interpolation. A finite-sample falsification test and seed-swept experiments confirm the theory.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Unsupervised Causal Abstractions Discovery

arXiv:2606.19594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal abstractions formalize when a high-level structural causal model (SCM) captures the interventional behavior of a lower-level SCM. Existing applications of this notion largely follow a hypothesis-testing paradigm: an expert proposes a candidate high-level model and then evaluates if the low-level system implements it. We study the complementary problem of learning a high-level model directly from low-level measurements. Our contributions leverage hypotheses from low-rank causal discovery, and can be summarized as follows: (1) we show that observations generated by a low-rank graph induce latents that form a causal abstraction, (2) we provide identifiability results about these latents, and (3) we propose a practical objective to learn this high-level SCM.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DCP-Prune: Ultra-Low Token Pruning with Distribution Consistency Preservation

Recent vision token pruning methods effectively preserve model performance under moderate token budgets but become unstable under ultra-low token budget. Our analysis shows that as the pruning budget decreases, accuracy degradation is often accompanied by larger feature distribution shifts. Critically, the degree of this distribution shift strongly correlates with performance degradation. To better characterize this phenomenon, we introduce a lightweight distribution consistency metric to estimate the distribution shift between retained and full tokens. Motivated by these observations, we propose a two-stage pruning framework consisting of Anchor-Context Graph Recovery (ACGR) and Text-Aware Token Cluster Selection (TATCS). Specifically, ACGR transfers contextual information before token removal, while TATCS dynamically re-selects representative tokens when severe distribution shift is detected. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior and more stable performance under ultra-low token budget. Notably, it retains 92.1% of the upper-bound average performance on LLaVA-1.5-7B with only 16 visual tokens.

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

HLS-GPT: A Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) for Continental-Scale NASA Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) Reflectance Reconstruction Across All Bands on Arbitrary Dates

Recent deep learning methods for Landsat and Sentinel-2 reflectance time series reconstruction remain limited by restricted spectral coverage, limited geographic scalability, or patch-based designs with short temporal contexts. We present HLS-GPT, a large-scale generative pretrained Transformer model for reconstructing NASA Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 30 m surface reflectance for all bands, any date, and any pixel location. HLS-GPT uses a hierarchical Transformer architecture to handle the different spectral band configurations of Landsat and Sentinel-2 and operates on single-pixel 12-month time series. To capture geographic and seasonal variability, the model was trained with nine years of HLS time series from more than 0.25 million training pixels across the conterminous United States. A random cropping and masking strategy extracts 12-month periods with varying start dates across epochs, masks 50% of valid observations, and trains the model to reconstruct the masked reflectance values from the remaining observations. Evaluation using more than 62,000 independent test pixels shows robust reconstruction under diverse land surface conditions, including complex crop phenology and sparse, irregular observations. Leave-one-observation-out evaluation achieved reconstruction RMSE below 0.026 for all HLS spectral bands, with relative RMSE below 35% for visible bands and below 13% for other bands. Red-edge band errors were comparable to red and near-infrared errors despite the absence of red-edge bands on Landsat. Sensitivity analyses that randomly masked 10% to 90% of test observations showed only modest degradation when 10% to 50% of observations were masked, with all-band RMSE below 0.028. Image reconstruction over nine independent 109 by 109 km CONUS HLS tiles further demonstrates that HLS-GPT outperforms two conventional methods and the NASA-IBM Prithvi model.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Optimal Sparsification of Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2606.19763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove an optimal dimension-free sparsification theorem for suprema of centered Gaussian processes. Given a bounded set $T\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$, we show that the supremum of the canonical Gaussian process on $T$ can be $L^2$-approximated by the supremum of a shifted subprocess indexed by only $\exp(O(1/\varepsilon^2))$ points, with error at most $\varepsilon$ times the Gaussian width of $T$. In particular, the size of the approximating process is independent of both the ambient dimension and the cardinality of the original index set. This improves a recent sparsification theorem of De, Nadimpalli, O'Donnell, and Servedio (2026) by an exponential factor, and we show that the dependence on $\varepsilon$ is tight up to constants in the exponent. As consequences, we obtain an exponentially improved junta theorem for norms over Gaussian space and sharpen results on learning, property testing, and polyhedral approximation of convex sets under the Gaussian measure. The proof is based on an interpolation argument that combines Sudakov's minoration with the Brascamp–Lieb inequality.

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

Trust but Verify: Mitigating Medical Hallucinations via Post-Hoc Adversarial Auditing and Multi-Agent Feedback Loops

arXiv:2606.14149v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in healthcare settings, yet their tendency to hallucinate poses risks when clinical decisions are involved. This study examine whether LLMs recommend recently banned or withdrawn pharmaceuticals when answering clinical questions and tests an agent-based method for reducing such errors. We developed a five-agent "Trust but Verify" system using a single LLM backbone. To measure regulatory knowledge obsolescence, we created an adversarial dataset of 103 clinical MCQs where historically correct answers now refer to banned substances. This scale ensures statistical significance across various therapeutic classes. We evaluated three open-access model families (GPT-OSS, Llama-3, Falcon-3) under vanilla and agentic conditions. Performance was measured via pointwise score, label accuracy, Hallucination Error Rate (HER), and Component Fidelity (CF) score. We also observed clinical safety regression in proprietary models. In default configurations, all models showed high hallucination rates, consistently selecting banned drugs that matched training data patterns. Our proposed agentic architecture reduced HER by approximately 53% across models. Pointwise scores shifted from -0.25 (unsafe recommendation) toward 0.0 (appropriate refusal). The safety audit intercepted dangerous outputs even when models' parametric knowledge favored the banned substance. The proposed multi-agent framework offers a model-agnostic method for enforcing regulatory compliance that prioritizes patient safety over fluent text generation. Our work demonstrates a practical approach for deploying autonomous AI systems in safety-critical healthcare settings. It shows how real-time regulatory data can be integrated into LLM pipelines to support clinical decision-making.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Would you still call this Dax? Novel Visual References in VLMs and Humans

Vision-language models (VLMs), like human learners, are frequently exposed to new visual concepts, but how they map novel visual references to language after exposure remains largely underexplored, particularly when those references contradict prior knowledge from pre-training. To study this, we present the Novel Visual References Dataset (NVRD): 19,176 images spanning 90 visual concepts across different levels of visual novelty, each with up to 20 increasingly perturbed versions of the original object to probe generalization. Unlike prior work on visual augmentations of familiar concepts, NVRD comprises entirely novel, open-ended stimuli constructed from scratch, mirroring how humans encounter genuinely new concepts. We evaluate 3 open- and 2 closed-source models alongside 2,400 human judgments for direct human-model comparison, and find that (i) models struggle to acquire novel concepts in-context when they contradict prior knowledge, and (ii) while models and humans show correlated sensitivity to visual perturbations, models significantly overgeneralize, extending learned labels to stimuli that humans reject. We contribute NVRD as a corpus and benchmark for research on visual concept learning in both humans and machines.

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

Learning with Simulators: No Regret in a Computationally Bounded World

arXiv:2606.13576v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the minimal assumptions necessary for generalization is the fundamental question in learning theory. Unfortunately, most results rely heavily on independence (or some proxy thereof) of the data-generating process, while results for strongly dependent data are far more limited. Towards addressing this gap, we introduce the framework of simulatable processes, where the learner has access to a simulator that approximates the distribution generating the data (which may be an arbitrarily complex and dependent process). Surprisingly, given access to such a simulator, we show that we can recover the same learning guarantees as in the classical setting with independent data, namely, error bounds that depend on the VC dimension. Further, we use this framework to study the power of conditional sampling and show strict statistical and computational advantages in this setting. As a highlight of our framework, we exhibit a single algorithm that simultaneously learns any given VC class under all processes samplable in bounded polynomial time, with regret controlled by the time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity of the process. This provides a significant conceptual broadening of the classical PAC model.

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

The Coin Flip Judge? Reliability and Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

LLM-as-a-Judge is now widely used to rank model outputs, train reward models, and populate public leaderboards, but its run-to-run reliability remains under-characterized. We study repeated identical evaluations on 29 tasks spanning 10 categories using two OpenAI judge models (GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini), with 50 pairwise trials and 50 pointwise trials per question, supplemented by temperature and prompt-sensitivity ablations. Across judges, pairwise preferences flip on average 13.6% of the time, with 28% of questions exceeding a 20% flip rate and one question reaching 56%. GPT-4o-mini also exhibits a significant first-position bias (72% A-majority, p = 0.024). At the same time, mean pointwise score gaps are small (0.19–0.36 on a 10-point scale) and not statistically significant in aggregate, producing a pairwise–pointwise gap: judges frequently choose a winner even when their own scalar scores provide little evidence of a meaningful quality difference. Beyond within-judge instability, cross-judge agreement is only 76% ($\kappa = 0.51$), semantically equivalent prompt templates change majority outcomes in 25% of tested cases, and deterministic decoding reduces but does not eliminate inconsistency. A reliability curve analysis shows that, in our dataset, 11 repeated trials are needed for a majority vote to recover the 50-trial reference verdict with 95% probability on average, rising to 15 for high-variance questions. These findings suggest that single-trial LLM judging is often too noisy for high-stakes evaluation, and that multi-trial aggregation, position randomization, and explicit uncertainty reporting should be standard practice. Because both judges are from a single provider, cross-provider replication remains an important next step.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Boundary Embedding Shaping with Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Graph Structural Disentanglement

arXiv:2606.20283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at aggregating neighbor information for classification, yet their performance is hindered by graph structural entanglement, where spurious correlations from semantically irrelevant neighbors contaminate node embeddings. This challenge is most acute for nodes near class boundaries in the embedding space, where amplified structural noise blurs decision boundaries and destabilizes predictions. Existing robust GNN methods largely treat all nodes uniformly, ignoring boundary vulnerabilities. In this paper, to improve classification performance, we tackle graph structural disentanglement by identifying boundary-region entanglement as the primary bottleneck and propose Boundary Embedding Shaping (BES), an adaptive contrastive learning GNN plug-in module that selectively suppresses spurious structural noise at decision boundaries with minimal model parameter perturbation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BES consistently improves boundary discrimination and outperforms existing leading methods. Notably, BES boosts GCN performance by an average of 3.3% in node classification (up to 5.0% on WikiCS) and achieves superior accuracy in link prediction.

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

ProtoX-AD: Self-Explainable Time Series Anomaly Detection and Characterization

arXiv:2606.13277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in time series anomaly detection (TSAD) have highlighted the effectiveness of self-supervised classification-based approaches. These methods apply transformations to normal training samples, training a classifier to recognize transformation-specific patterns that help identify anomalies through increased classification errors. Despite their strong performance, a significant challenge is their lack of explainability, as they provide limited insight into the characteristics of flagged anomalies. To address this limitation, we propose ProtoX-AD, a prototype-based self-explainable framework for self-supervised TSAD. ProtoX-AD learns transformation-aware latent representations alongside interpretable prototypes, enabling both accurate anomaly detection and the identification of distinct anomalous profiles through prototype-based explanations. Additionally, it allows for systematic analysis of how transformation design impacts detection performance and explainability. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ProtoX-AD achieves detection performance comparable to its black-box counterparts while offering more consistent and semantically meaningful explanations than existing explainable baselines. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Aitorzan3/ProtoX-AD.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

OmniTraffic: A Controllable Generation Pipeline and Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Reasoning

Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics. However, existing traffic-oriented multimodal benchmarks largely emphasize passive visual recognition or isolated video understanding, offering limited support for evaluating structure-aware traffic reasoning under controlled conditions. We introduce OmniTraffic, a controllable generation pipeline and benchmark for spatio-temporal traffic reasoning. Built around 12 real-world intersections reconstructed into editable 3D traffic environments and complemented by surveillance footage from two countries, OmniTraffic supports both controlled and natural-condition evaluation. It defines a three-level task hierarchy spanning scene perception, multi-view and temporal reasoning, and decision support. Using structured traffic metadata, OmniTraffic generates synchronized multi-view VQA samples covering vehicle states, lane functions, view–BEV correspondence, temporal dynamics, and signal-phase analysis, resulting in 8M VQA samples and a 3K human-verified test set. Evaluation of eleven frontier MLLMs reveals a large human–model gap, with the most pronounced failures in topology-grounded and spatio-temporal reasoning tasks. Fine-tuning a lightweight MLLM on simulated OmniTraffic data further improves performance on real-world traffic scenes, demonstrating the value of simulation-generated supervision for traffic-specific multimodal reasoning. Beyond a fixed dataset, OmniTraffic provides an extensible pipeline with configurable intersections, camera views, traffic demands, signal phases, visual conditions, and rare events.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

IOAH3: Importance-Driven Adaptive Spatial Partitioning

arXiv:2606.18280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present IOAH3 (Importance-Oriented Adaptive H3 partitioning), a computational method for constructing data-driven spatial partitions of geo-referenced observation domains. Standard approaches to spatial aggregation adopt fixed areal units, such as administrative boundaries or uniform hexagonal grids at a single resolution, without regard to the informational content of the underlying observations in each region. This leads to the well-known modifiable areal unit problem: statistical and inferential results depend on the arbitrary choice of partition, and spatially concentrated phenomena are averaged out in coarse cells that obscure fine-scale structure. IOAH3 addresses this by constructing an adaptive partition in three stages: multi-source feature extraction and importance scoring via principal component analysis over road density, POI density, building density, and terrain roughness signals, with population and flood-hazard data entering as auxiliary inputs to cell filtering and spatial smoothness; spatial cell selection via Markov Random Field graph-cut optimisation, which jointly maximises per-cell importance while enforcing spatial contiguity; and data-driven hierarchical refinement of high-importance regions to finer H3 resolution levels, with neighbour-propagated support to avoid isolated fine-resolution islands. The resulting partitions serve as input to spatial inference pipelines and provide a principled resolution of the partition-sensitivity problem prior to any modelling step.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Solving Nonequilibrium Dynamics via Influence Matrix Bootstrap: Floquet-PXP Model

arXiv:2606.19430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies of integrable systems have profoundly deepened the fundamental understanding of quantum many-body physics. While equilibrium properties such as ground states and thermodynamics can often be characterized efficiently, accurately characterizing nonequilibrium integrable dynamics remains a significant challenge. Here, we address this problem in the "Rule 201" quantum cellular automaton, an integrable Trotterization of the PXP Hamiltonian. Using the tensor-network approach of the influence matrix, we develop local conditions called generalized zipper conditions that allow exact solutions of local dynamics. We also introduce a numerical bootstrap method for solving influence matrices with finite but relatively large bond dimensions. This uncovers a rich landscape of nonequilibrium behavior exhibiting initial-state dependence. As an example, we investigate the fate of persistent oscillating dynamics under local non-integrable perturbations, and present analytical results for non-thermal relaxation constrained by conservation laws. We also obtain numerically exact results for entanglement growth across a broad class of initial states. Furthermore, from an information-theoretic perspective, we identify a refined structure of multitime correlations termed the hidden Markov order: the memory encoded in the dynamics separates into finite-length and long-range distributed components, which becomes transparent in an exact split-index matrix-product-state representation of the influence matrix. Our approach enables unified investigations of nonthermalizing and thermalizing regimes of nonequilibrium dynamics within a single analytically tractable model, and can be tested experimentally in state-of-the-art quantum simulators such as Rydberg atom arrays.

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

Attention Alignment Between Humans and Vision-Language Models

Visual perception depends on top-down goals and bottom-up sensory mechanisms. Vision-language models implement both, allowing us to treat each component as a separable hypothesis about what drives where we look. We compared spatial attention maps from six vision-language models against human fixation heatmaps recorded on 200 images during two tasks (general description and social captioning). The six models spanned a 2$\times$2 factorial of CNN vs.\ ViT encoders crossed with LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders, plus Molmo 7B-D and Qwen3.5 9B. We found that both decoder and encoder architecture shaped alignment, but decoder choice dominated. LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders increased alignment by 40–50 percentage points (80–87\% vs.\ 40–59\% of the human noise ceiling). In contrast, CNN vs.\ ViT encoders contributed a secondary 5–20 point advantage depending on decoder family, with CNN-LSTM the most aligned model overall (85–87\%). Despite their alignment advantage, LSTM-decoder attention maps were spatially diffuse and minimally task-differentiated; ViT-Transformer, the weakest in alignment, showed the sharpest spatial concentration and strongest task differentiation. A hemispatial-neglect simulation confirmed that ablating attention impacted LSTM decoders more than Transformer decoders. In an exploratory extension using TRIBE-simulated synthetic neural responses, fixation alignment and neural relevance dissociate: CNN-Transformer attention maps better predicted synthetic brain activity despite lower fixation alignment, with attention maps best predicting early visual cortex. Together, top-down and bottom-up components trade off what they predict in behavioral and synthetic neural data.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Landscape-Similarity-Guided Optimization in Divide-and-Conquer QAOA

arXiv:2602.21689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Divide-and-conquer strategies mitigate hardware constraints for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices by partitioning large interaction graphs into smaller, hardware-compatible sub-problems. However, this approach introduces a severe classical training bottleneck: a decomposition across $m$ boundary nodes generates $2^m$ distinct sub-problems that typically require independent optimization. In this work, we demonstrate that across diverse synthetic and real-world interaction graphs, the variational landscapes of these reduced QAOA instances actually exhibit a robust universality. Adapting the replica-overlap framework of spin-glass physics, we define a landscape-overlap order parameter $q$ to quantify geometric correlations between energy landscapes, revealing a sharp landscape-similarity transition as graph connectivity is tuned. Exploiting this, we introduce Doubly Optimized QAOA (DO-QAOA), an adaptive pipeline that collapses the sub-problems from $2^m$ distinct sub-problems into $K=\mathcal{O}(1)$ effective landscape classes. By performing optimization on a single representative sub-problem and dynamically transferring parameters to remaining sub-problems, DO-QAOA lowers runtime and quantum measurement overhead by orders of magnitude while maintaining a competitive Approximation Ratio Gap (ARG).