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) 2026-06-19

Scaling Generative Foundation Models for Chest Radiography with Rectified Flow Transformers

arXiv:2606.19460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the first generative foundation model for chest radiograph synthesis trained from scratch at the billion-parameter scale. Existing radiographic AI models often suffer from poor generalisation across patient subpopulations, institutions, and acquisition settings, resulting in limited real-world clinical utility. Controlled, high-fidelity synthesis of chest radiographs is a promising path toward diversifying clinical datasets and evaluating the robustness of diagnostic models. Therefore, we present the largest specialist generative foundation model for chest radiographs to date, with over 1.3B parameters, trained for 1.6T tokens on a curated, heterogeneous dataset comprising 1.2M radiographs and clinical expert-guided metadata. Our model supports controllable radiograph generation and editing across multiple demographic subgroups, acquisition views, and a dozen pathologies. Moreover, we significantly advance the state of the art in radiograph synthesis fidelity, producing images that are indistinguishable from real radiographs to clinical experts.

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

AutoPass: Evidence-Guided LLM Agents for Compiler Performance Tuning

arXiv:2606.20373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for code compilation tasks, but applying them to runtime performance tuning is difficult due to complex microarchitectural effects and noisy runtime measurements. We present AutoPass, a multi-agent framework for compiler performance tuning that uses compiler and runtime evidence to guide LLM-generated optimization decisions. Rather than treating the compiler as a black box like prior auto-tuning schemes, AutoPass opens up the compiler to the LLM, enabling it to query compiler-internal optimization states and analyze the intermediate representation to orchestrate compiler options. The search process iteratively refines optimization configurations using measured runtime feedback to diagnose regressions and guide latency-improving edits. AutoPass operates in an inference-only, training-free setting and requires no offline training or task-specific fine-tuning, making it readily applicable to new benchmarks and platforms. We implement AutoPass on the LLVM compiler and evaluate it on server-grade x86-64 and embedded ARM64 systems. AutoPass outperforms expert-tuned heuristics and classical autotuning methods, achieving geometric-mean speedups of 1.043x and 1.117x over LLVM -O3 on x86-64 and ARM64, respectively.

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

AgenticRec: A Recommendation-Oriented Agentic Framework with Progressive Tool-Integrated Reasoning Optimization

arXiv:2603.21613v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recommender agents built on Large Language Models offer a promising paradigm for personalized recommendation. However, existing agents typically suffer from a misalignment between their tool-integrated reasoning trajectories and recommendation feedback, limiting their ability to distinguish fine-grained user preferences. To address these challenges, we propose AgenticRec, an agentic recommendation framework that formulates recommendation as a tool-integrated reasoning process over a recommendation-oriented tool suite. Built upon this framework, we further develop a dedicated two-stage training paradigm tailored for recommender agents. In the first stage, we introduce Recommendation-Oriented Trajectory Activation, optimize the agentic recommendation ability under implicit feedback. In the second stage, Progressive Preference Refinement further refines the agent through bidirectional preference reasoning over self-bootstrapped hard pairs, progressively sharpening preference boundaries. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AgenticRec. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AgenticRec-FB16.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Epileptogenicity alters intrahippocampal ripple propagation

Objective: Tracing the propagation of high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) aids in localizing epileptogenic regions and improving surgical outcomes. We examined how hippocampal epileptogenicity influences the propagation properties of the HFOs it generates. Methods: We analyzed non-REM sleep stereo-EEG from 49 patients (68 hemispheres) with verified hippocampal contacts. Hippocampi were stratified by excitability: 28 seizure onset zone (SOZ), 22 more-irritative non-SOZ (>6 interictal epileptiform discharges [IED]/min), and 18 less-irritative non-SOZ (

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

DriveReward: A Comprehensive Dataset and Generative Vision-Language Reward Model for Autonomous Driving

Reward models play a pivotal role in reinforcement learning (RL) and multi-modal trajectory selection for autonomous driving. However, acquiring such rewards typically relies on hand-crafted rule-based objectives or perception ground truth, which hinders generalization for data-scaling. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated feasibility as reward models in other domains, their effectiveness in driving tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we bridge this gap by (1) introducing DriveReward, a reasoning trajectory evaluation dataset rigorously labeled via temporally-grounded visual guidance, and augmented with counterfactual driving behaviors., (2) alongside a specialized Vision-Language Reward Model. To address the scarcity of failure cases in conventional datasets, we propose a counterfactual data annotation scheme to construct cases encompassing diverse driving styles and erroneous behaviors. Evaluations on our proposed benchmark reveal that even leading open-source and proprietary VLMs fail to excel across all tasks, highlighting significant room for improvement in existing models. Building on these findings, we subsequently tailor a specialized 1B reward model that outperforms larger VLMs on task-specific reward alignment. Finally, we validate our reward model's effectiveness by integrating it into RL finetuning and multi-modal trajectory scoring across multiple baselines, achieving performance comparable to rule-based reward calculations in both open-loop and closed-loop evaluation.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Heteroskedastic Signals in Budgeted LLM Verification: Structural Heterogeneity Limits Optimization Gains

作者:

arXiv:2606.15841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems increasingly use uncertainty signals to allocate limited computation across verification, test-time scaling, tool execution, and other selective-compute decisions. Such policies rely on a global signal comparability assumption: equal scores should carry comparable decision value across inputs. Using budgeted verification as a controlled diagnostic setting, we identify a failure mode of this assumption: uncertainty quality is heteroskedastic across cost strata, with some regions exhibiting near-random discriminability despite concentrating many errors. Under an explicit local model, we characterize the resulting distortion of global allocation and show that its upper bound scales with cross-stratum signal-quality dispersion. We separate weak signals, optimization instability, and structural heterogeneity through a controlled intervention hierarchy: Threshold, MP-Adapt, MP-Strat, and a deliberately simple cost-stratified thresholding intervention (CST). Across MBPP and MATH using Qwen3-8B, LLaMA3-8B, and GPT-4o-mini, global online adaptation yields inconsistent gains over static thresholding; MP-Strat partially recovers performance, while CST improves hit rate by up to 17 percentage points in strongly heterogeneous settings without gradient updates. These results identify structural heterogeneity, rather than optimizer weakness alone, as the primary bottleneck in the observed settings. More broadly, misaligned feedback structure cannot always be repaired by stronger optimization.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Hua-Chen New Theory of Economic Optimization

arXiv:2504.19134v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Between 1957-1985, Chinese mathematician Loo-Keng Hua pioneered economic optimization theory through three key contributions: establishing economic stability's fundamental theorem, proving the uniqueness of equilibrium solutions in economic systems, and developing a consumption-integrated model 50 days before his death. Since 1988, Mu-Fa Chen has been working on Hua's theory. He introduced stochastics, namely Markov chains, to economic optimization theory. He updated and developed Hua's model and came up with a new model (Chen's model) which has become the starting point of a new economic optimization theory. Chen's theory can be applied to economic stability test, bankruptcy prediction, product ranking and classification, economic prediction and adjustment, economic structure optimization. Chen's theory can also provide efficient algorithms that are programmable and intelligent. {Stochastics} is the cornerstone of Chen's theory. There is no overlap between Chen's theory, and the existing mathematical economy theory and the economics developments that were awarded Nobel Prizes in Economics between 1969 and 2024. The distinguished features of Chen's theory from the existing theories are quantitative, calculable, predictable, optimizable, programmable and can be intelligent. This survey provides a theoretical overview of the newly published monograph [5rw24]. Specifically, the invariant of the economic structure matrix, also known as the Chen's invariant, was first published in this survey.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines

arXiv:2606.19134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines (PQLRM), a multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm for tasks whose reward structure is specified by a set of reward machines (RMs). PQLRM combines Pareto Q-Learning (PQL), which maintains sets of vector-valued Q-estimates to approximate the Pareto front, with enhancements from Q-Learning with Reward Machines (QRM), which exploits the factored automaton structure of the reward signal. This yields a multi-policy algorithm that remains sample-efficient under non-Markovian, RM-encoded rewards. Experimental trials show that PQLRM converges faster than a naive PQL baseline applied to the cross-product MDP and can synthesize Pareto-optimal policies that QRM cannot.

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

Exploring the potential of AlphaEarth and TESSERA embeddings for Fine-scale Local Climate Zone Mapping: A case study across five cities in Switzerland

arXiv:2606.20034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding urban spatial morphology is critical for climate modeling, risk assessment, and sustainable urban design, and Local Climate Zone (LCZ) mapping provides the basic framework for this. However, many cities still use coarse ~100-m resolution LCZ records, which are unsuitable for fine-scale urban research. In this study, precomputed embeddings from TESSERA (Feng et al., 2025) and AlphaEarth (Brown et al., 2025) are compared to traditional Sentinel-1/2 (S1S2) composites in five Swiss cities to see if they can upscale coarse LCZ maps to 10-m resolution using an attention-based U-Net. Three experiments assess multi-city transferability, the impact of higher-resolution reference data, and temporal robustness to year-to-year phenology changes. We find that all datasets achieve strong performance with test data Intersection-over-Union (IoU) ranging from 0.59-0.69 and 0.77-0.82 in the first two experiments. TESSERA consistently outperforms both S1S2 and AlphaEarth across both settings As expected, we find that the transfer of embedding-based models from one year to another remains an open challenge. Overall, however, our results demonstrate the promising potential of embeddings derived from EO foundation models to reduce time consuming preprocessing, respectively, manual feature engineering tasks and to guide a universal deep learning-based LCZ mapping workflow. When combined with a simple location-aware attention U-Net architecture, the embeddings enhance regional transferability and scalability, supporting the development of comprehensive and reproducible fine-scale LCZ maps for global urban climate applications Improving reference data quality remains the strongest lever for further accuracy gains.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

EDEN: A Large-Scale Corpus of Clinical Notes for Italian

We present EDEN (Emergency Department Electronic Notes), a new and unique large-scale corpus of clinical notes produced in Emergency Departments of Italian hospitals. The corpus, in its current version, is composed of approximately 4 million clinical notes fully anonymized, covering diverse phases of patient care during the stay in the emergency department. In addition, a subset of about six thousand notes has been manually annotated by clinical experts through a structured Case Report Form (CRF) containing 132 items relevant for two patient situations in emergency departments, dyspnea and loss of consciousness. Items may assume numerical values (e.g., for blood saturation), categorical (e.g., for level of consciousness ), binary (e.g., for presence of traumas), and mixed value types. The annotation process involved multiple clinicians and underwent iterative revision to resolve ambiguities in item formulation, resulting in a richly structured (although high imbalanced) resource. The dataset aims to fill a relevant gap of data able to support both the development and the use of Large Language Models in concrete medical applications. We describe the data collection protocol, the on-site anonymisation pipeline, corpus statistics, and the annotation scheme. Finally, we propose CRF-filling as a novel structured information extraction benchmark, and provide zero-shot baseline resulting from Gemma-27B and MedGemma-27B. To the best of our knowledge, the EDEN dataset is the largest freely available corpus of clinical notes existing for the Italian language.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Finite-Dimensional Type I von Neumann Algebras in PyTorch: A GPU-Accelerated Framework for Random Block-Diagonal Operators

arXiv:2606.15882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present \texttt{torch\_vn\_algebra}, an open-source Python library built on PyTorch for numerical experiments with finite-dimensional Type I von Neumann algebras (direct sums of matrix algebras). The library provides: $\bullet$ a compact batched tensor representation $(B,C,k_{\max},k_{\max})$ that handles both Monte Carlo samples and multiple direct summands; $\bullet$ lazy evaluation of operators to avoid unnecessary memory allocation; $\bullet$ generation of random operators with arbitrary eigenvalue distributions (user-provided samplers) and various unitary ensembles (Haar, $\mathrm{SU}(n)$, COE, CSE, diagonal phases); $\bullet$ functional calculus via SVD (absolute value, square root, inverse, entropy) and a hybrid method for extreme eigenvalues (exact diagonalisation for $k_{\max}\le256$, otherwise power iteration); $\bullet$ three trace functionals (blunt, normalised subspace trace, and the von Neumann tracial state); $\bullet$ GPU-accelerated batched linear algebra for moderate-scale Monte Carlo studies (e.g., $2\times10^4$ samples of $100\times100$ operators). The library is validated against analytical expectations (Haar moments, trace properties). Performance benchmarks on a Tesla P100 GPU are presented and discussed. Limitations and future work are outlined. The code is open-source.

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

Listening with Attention: Entropy-Guided Explainability for Transformer-Based Audio Models

arXiv:2606.14647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper are highly accurate, but their predictions remain difficult to interpret. Existing explainable AI (XAI) methods often lack faithfulness and precise temporal grounding. We propose Listening with Entropy-guided Attention for Faithful explainability (LEAF-X), a model-intrinsic XAI framework for transformer-based ASR. LEAF-X combines entropy-guided attention weighting, multi-layer attention rollout, and optional causal ablations to identify low-entropy, high-impact heads and layers, producing sparse token-to-frame attributions. Unlike perturbation-based explainers or raw attention maps, LEAF-X exploits the internal structure of encoder-decoder and speech-augmented decoder-only models to generate explanations that better reflect model computation. Results show 32% improved faithfulness, 35-39% stronger locality/sparsity, and the most stable attributions, supporting more transparent and auditable ASR.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

An In-depth Study of LLM Contributions to the Bin Packing Problem

arXiv:2510.27353v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent studies have suggested that Large Language Models (LLMs) could provide interesting ideas contributing to mathematical discovery. This claim was motivated by reports that LLM-based genetic algorithms produced heuristics offering new insights into the online bin packing problem under uniform and Weibull distributions. In this work, we reassess this claim through a detailed analysis of the heuristics produced by LLMs, examining both their behavior and interpretability. Despite being human-readable, these heuristics remain largely opaque even to domain experts. Building on this analysis, we propose a new class of algorithms tailored to these specific bin packing instances. The derived algorithms are significantly simpler, more efficient, more interpretable, and more generalizable, suggesting that the considered instances are themselves relatively simple. We then discuss the limitations of the claim regarding LLMs' contribution to this problem, which appears to rest on the mistaken assumption that the instances had previously been studied. Our findings instead emphasize the need for rigorous validation and contextualization when assessing the scientific value of LLM-generated outputs.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

How long does it take to train an Elephant Random Walk

作者:

arXiv:2509.15049v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study how conditioning on the first $k$ steps, which we think of as training, affects the long-term behavior of the Elephant Random Walk. When the elephant is conditioned to be at position $k$ at time $k$, the first return time to the origin scales as $k^{(4-4p)/(3-4p)}$ in the diffusive regime, and grows exponentially in the critical regime. We loosely interpret this as a measurement of the rate at which the elephant forgets its training.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

UltraEP: Unleash MoE Training and Inference on Rack-Scale Nodes with Near-Optimal Load Balancing

arXiv:2606.04101v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) is becoming pivotal for training and serving frontier MoE models, but it also amplifies device-level expert load imbalance into compute stragglers, token all-to-all bottlenecks, and activation-memory spikes. Existing balancers redistribute experts periodically based on historical load, which becomes unreliable for production deployments with non-stationary load patterns. We present UltraEP, the first exact-load, real-time balancer for large-EP MoE training and serving prefill on rack-scale nodes (RSNs). Leveraging the extended scale-up connectivity among dozens of GPUs within RSNs, UltraEP rebalances every microbatch and layer on critical paths, which requires nontrivial co-design of plan solving and expert replication communication to minimize exposed overhead. To this end, UltraEP eagerly reacts to post-gating load with an efficient quota-driven planner, and executes the resulting irregular expert-state transfers with RSN-native persistent tile streaming and relay-based fan-out mitigation. We evaluate UltraEP in a multi-RSN deployment of up to 256 GPUs, using cutting-edge MoE models from 106B to 671B parameters. Averaged across training and serving, UltraEP achieves 94.3% of the force-balanced ideal throughput, delivering 1.49$\times$ improvement over no-balancing, while reducing the final inter-rank imbalance from 1.30$-$4.01 to 1.01$-$1.04.

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

Information-Theoretic Measures in AI: A Practical Decision Guide

arXiv:2604.23716v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Information-theoretic (IT) measures are ubiquitous in artificial intelligence: entropy drives decision-tree splits and uncertainty quantification, cross-entropy is the default classification loss, mutual information underpins representation learning and feature selection, and transfer entropy reveals directed influence in dynamical systems. A second, less consolidated family of measures, integrated information (Phi), effective information (EI), and autonomy, has emerged for characterizing agent complexity. Despite wide adoption, measure selection is often decoupled from estimator assumptions, failure modes, and safe inferential claims. This paper provides a practical decision framework for all seven measures, organized around three prescriptive questions for each: (i) what question does the measure answer and in which AI context; (ii) which estimator is appropriate for the data type and dimensionality; and (iii) what is the most dangerous misuse. The framework is operationalized in two complementary artifacts: a measure-selection flowchart and a master decision table. We cover both AI/ML and decision-making agent application domains per measure, with standardized Bridge Boxes linking IT quantities to cognitive constructs. Three worked examples illustrate the framework on concrete practitioner scenarios spanning representation learning, temporal influence analysis, and evolved agent complexity.

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

PaAno+: Multiscale Encoding and Cross-Variable Attention for Time Series Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.20055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series anomaly detection has significant practical value for industrial and medical monitoring, as well as other critical domains. Current Transformer- and large-model-based detection approaches incur excessive computational overhead, while existing lightweight alternatives are constrained by insufficient feature extraction and inadequate modeling of dependencies across multivariate variables. To mitigate the above drawbacks, this study develops a lightweight, efficient anomaly detection model, dubbed PaAno, within the patch-oriented representation learning paradigm. In the encoder module, a multiscale feature-extraction backbone is constructed using convolutional kernels with differentiated receptive fields to capture hierarchical temporal characteristics; subsequent cross-scale adaptive attention aggregation, combined with residual connection optimization, further stabilizes feature representation learning. A cross-variable fusion attention module is embedded to explicitly characterize inter-variable correlations, empowering the model to identify anomalous patterns amid intricate operational conditions. Moreover, a novel pretext task based on temporal patch-window sorting is customized to uncover intrinsic structural properties of time series, and triplet loss is leveraged to optimize the patch embedding space for enhanced feature discrimination. Extensive experiments on the TSB-AD benchmark demonstrate that the proposed PaAno achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on both univariate and multivariate tasks, yielding significant performance gains across evaluation metrics, including VUS-PR, relative to the original PaAno. Leveraging a compact network design, the presented model achieves favorable computational efficiency, enabling deployment on resource-limited terminals for real-time anomaly inference.

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

Density Ridge Selective Prediction for LLM and VLM Hallucination Detection under Calibration Label Scarcity

Hallucination detection in large language and vision-language models is increasingly framed as selective prediction, where a detector assigns a confidence score and abstains when confidence is low. Unsupervised sampling detectors (Semantic Entropy) avoid labels but plateau in quality, while supervised probes attain stronger in-distribution scores yet degrade sharply when calibration labels are scarce. We recover the response manifold of an LLM as the density ridge of a kernel density estimate built on a six-dimensional kinematic feature map of hidden state generation trajectories. A test generation is scored by the negated Euclidean distance from its projected feature point to the nearest ridge vertex, yielding a low-dimensional geometric skeleton of the stochastic output distribution. We evaluate against Semantic Entropy, topological methods, and log-probability on six QA benchmarks (HaluEval-QA, TriviaQA, GSM8K, POPE, ScienceQA, A-OKVQA) using eight text and vision LLMs in a deliberately label-scarce protocol ($n_{cal}{=}200$ queries, $N{=}5$ generations). Our ridge-based score beats on AUROC with 5-20 points gain, while demonstrating tempered degradation under calibration-label scarcity.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Lesion-DDPM: Lesion-Enhanced 3D Diffusion for MS MRI Synthesis

3D FLAIR MRI is widely recommended as one of the standard MRI sequences for brain imaging in multiple sclerosis (MS), but publicly available MS datasets remain relatively small and vary across scanners, acquisition protocols, and lesion patterns. This scarcity and variability hinder the development of robust neuroimaging machine learning models and are particularly challenging for generative models that aim to synthesize images while preserving small, sparse lesions. We propose Lesion-DDPM, a 3D conditional diffusion framework for lesion-aware FLAIR synthesis that incorporates multi-level anatomical mask injection together with a lesion-weighted reconstruction loss to emphasize lesion voxels while maintaining global brain structure. Using a curated subset of the MSLesSeg dataset, we compare Lesion-DDPM with representative state-of-the-art GAN- and diffusion-based models, assessing both image-generation metrics and downstream 3D U-Net segmentation. In our experiments, Lesion-DDPM achieved the lowest lesion-region reconstruction error among all methods. In a downstream 3D U-Net lesion segmentation task, a model trained only on Lesion-DDPM-generated scans and evaluated on real MRIs reached a Dice score of 0.616 compared with 0.569 for the best competing synthetic dataset. When Lesion-DDPM images were added to the real training set, the Dice score further increased to 0.685.

22.
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.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FedSPC: Shared Parameter Correction for Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv:2606.13748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized federated learning (PFL) is one of the important approaches in federated learning for addressing statistical heterogeneity while enabling client-specific adaptation. Many PFL methods split the model into shared and personalized parameters, which are jointly trained on each client. However, this creates an optimization issue: shared parameters are updated by clients optimizing different local objectives, which can lead to inconsistent shared updates and weaken the shared representation. To address this problem, we propose Federated Shared Parameter Correction (FedSPC), a modular correction method for PFL. FedSPC applies control-variate correction only to the shared parameters of a given PFL method, while leaving personalized parameters unchanged. It can be integrated into three common PFL settings: shared feature extractors, shared classifiers, and fully shared models with local regularization. Experiments on CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet with ViT, ResNet-34, and VGG-11 show that FedSPC improves performance across representative PFL methods, including FedPer, FedRep, FedBABU, LG-FedAvg, and Ditto.

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

AGORA: Can Deliberation and Governance Gates Absorb Participation Bias in Transit Planning?

arXiv:2606.13696v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transit network design depends not only on the optimization algorithm but also on who shows up to the public hearing. Current practice often collects one-directional comments from self-selected attendees, leaving participant mix as an uncontrolled source of outcome variation. We present AGORA, a framework that holds the network, demand, and solver fixed while systematically varying meeting composition through stakeholder agents, structured deliberation, and governance gates. Across two standard benchmark networks at different scales, we find that (i) aggregate outcomes vary little across compositions, but on tail risk and fairness disparity, representative sampling still tends to outperform skewed compositions; (ii) without deliberation, composition produces no variation at all, showing that deliberation is the mechanism through which who attends affects outcomes; and (iii) governance gates compress cross-profile variance without shifting the average outcome on Mandl, but low acceptance on Mumford0 shows thresholds require instance-specific calibration. These findings reframe participation bias from an uncontrollable input to a process-design problem: even without guaranteed representative attendance, well-structured deliberation and governance criteria can substantially reduce how much outcomes depend on who is in the room.

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

LLM Features Can Hurt GNNs: Concatenation Interference on Homophilous Graph Benchmarks

Adding LLM-generated node features to graph neural networks (GNNs) is widely reported to improve accuracy on standard benchmarks. We document a contrasting observation: when LLM features are introduced through pure input concatenation (rather than joint training, distillation, or prompt-conditioning), they can systematically degrade accuracy on the same homophilous benchmarks where end-to-end LLM pipelines succeed. With an MLP backbone on the Planetoid public split and bag-of-words original features, concatenating SBERT-encoded GPT-4o-mini TAPE features reduces PubMed test accuracy by -17.0 +/- 0.3 pp and Cora by -4.3 +/- 0.6 pp (CiteSeer -0.6 +/- 0.8 pp, within seed noise). The drop attenuates as we relax each condition (GCN / GCNII / GAT backbones, random splits, smaller encoders) and reverses on medium-homophily WikiCS (+4.4 pp) and ogbn-arxiv (+11.7 pp). To predict when concatenation helps versus hurts, we report a simple measure of LLM-alone discriminability, Delta_sig. Across 9 datasets Delta_sig correlates with the concatenation cost more strongly than homophily at point estimate (r^2 = 0.38 vs. 0.06; N=9, bootstrap CIs overlap). The bootstrap-best change-point is tau = 13.8 pp, and the rule "Delta_sig