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.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Instrumental Activities of Daily Living in Older Adults with Epilepsy: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Multicenter Study

Objective: Instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) represent a critical but understudied measure of day-to-day function in persons with epilepsy(PWE). In the multicenter Brain Aging and Cognition in Epilepsy (BrACE) study of PWE aged greater than or equal to 55 years, we examined the proportion, clinical correlates, epilepsy-related predictors, and longitudinal trajectory of IADL impairment. Methods: IADLs were assessed using the Functional Activities Questionnaire (FAQ; range=0 to 30; higher=more impaired); a FAQ greater than or equal to 2 defines MCI-level impairment, and a FAQ greater than or equal to 5 defines dementia-level functional impairment. Multivariable logistic regression identified predictors of baseline function. Global cognition (Montreal Cognitive Assessment [MoCA]), individual cognitive measures, and quality of life (QOL) were compared between the impaired and unimpaired groups. Linear regression evaluated predictors of longitudinal functional decline. Results: Of 57 participants (mean age=66.6 years; female=52.6%), 38.6% (n=22) had MCI-level functional impairment and 17.5% (n=10) had dementia-level functional impairment. In univariate analyses, worse FAQ scores were associated with lower education, higher area deprivation index, early-onset epilepsy (EOE less than 60 years), antiseizure medication polytherapy, and epilepsy localization. In multivariable analysis, temporal lobe epilepsy (OR=4.46, 95% CI=1.09, 21.83,p=0.047), EOE(OR=7.14, 95% CI=1.16, 59.97, p=0.046), and lower education(OR=0.70,95% CI=0.49, 0.93, p=0.025) remained independently associated with baseline MCI-level functional-impairment. Lower education (OR=0.55,95% CI=0.29, 0.84, p=0.021) was the only factor associated with dementia-level IADL-impairment. IADL-impaired participants demonstrated lower verbal memory scores (adjusted p=0.041) and MoCA scores (adjusted p

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

An End-to-End Hybrid Framework for Rumour Detection in Low-Resources Algerian Dialect

The rapid growth of social media has intensified the spread of rumours. This issue is more challenging in the Algerian context due to the informal and code-switched nature of dialectal content, the scarcity of annotated resources, and the limited effectiveness of standard Arabic NLP tools on dialect text. This paper presents an end-to-end rumour detection hybrid framework for Algerian dialect social media content. We build a domain-specific annotated dataset by combining real social media posts, synthetic data, and the FASSILA corpus, with automatic labeling based on a similarity-based annotation process. A transliteration pipeline is also introduced to generate parallel datasets in Arabic script and Arabizi. We evaluate multiple approaches, including classical machine learning, deep learning, transformers, and hybrid models. Experimental results show that a hybrid approach combining transformer embeddings with a classical classifier achieves the best performance, reaching an F1-score of 0.84. We also find that domain-specific pre-training is more important than model size, with social media-trained models outperforming larger models trained on formal Arabic corpora. These results demonstrate the feasibility of rumour detection in low-resource Algerian dialect settings.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FAConformer: Frequency-Aware Convolutional Transformer for Auditory Attention Decoding

arXiv:2606.14120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Auditory attention decoding (AAD) aims to infer the attended speaker from neural responses in multi-speaker acoustic environments and is a key problem for neuro-steered hearing systems. Although recent studies have achieved encouraging progress, existing AAD models still do not fully exploit frequency domain electroencephalography (EEG) information. In particular, most approaches introduce multi-band information through handcrafted feature extraction or direct cross-band feature concatenation, which mainly exploit frequency information at a shallow level and may overlook band-specific patterns and cross-band interactions. To address these limitations, this paper proposes FAConformer, a frequency-aware CNN-Transformer framework for AAD that explicitly integrates band-specific encoding and adaptive cross-band interaction. Specifically, FAConformer first decomposes EEG signals into multiple frequency bands and assigns each band to an independent CNN-Transformer encoder for band-specific modeling. The resulting band-wise features are then adaptively fused by a carefully designed frequency-aware attention (FAA) module that models cross-band dependencies by treating band-wise features as tokens. Further, band-wise auxiliary supervision (BAS) is introduced to prevent weakly contributing branches from being under-optimized during joint training. In this way, FAConformer performs frequency-aware modeling that more effectively exploits frequency domain information. Extensive experiments on two public AAD datasets with three decision-window lengths demonstrated that FAConformer consistently outperformed 12 competitive baselines, surpassing the current state-of-the-art model by 4.9%. Further analyses of band importance, ablation, and parameter sensitivity verify the effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability of the proposed framework. Code is available at https://github.com/wzwvv/FAConformer.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

AURA: Active-Response Attribution under Treatment Ambiguity in Bacterial Cytological Profiling

When a bacterial sample is exposed to several antibiotics, not every applied drug necessarily acts: if the organism is resistant to one of them, that drug leaves no morphological trace. The clinically meaningful quantity is therefore not which antibiotics were applied, but which ones were active. We show that these two are sharply decoupled in real E. coli microscopy - naively assuming the applied combination equals the active one is correct only about 37% of the time - yet existing computational tools are ill-suited to recovering the active set. Forward perturbation models such as scGen, CPA, and IMPA are designed to predict appearance from treatment, not the reverse, and inverting them degrades sharply; discriminative image classifiers tend to memorise strain- and batch-specific texture and fail to transfer across experimental replicates. We introduce AURA, which reframes the task as constrained, energy-based inverse attribution. Its central inductive bias is that the active set must be a subset of the applied set; this collapses the candidate space and lets AURA infer the active subset of applied antibiotics by decomposing residual morphology into antibiotic response atoms and selecting the subset with the lowest reconstruction energy, using no strain label at test time. AURA-E adds evidence-aware abstention, withholding a prediction when candidate explanations remain near-equally plausible. On cross-replicate transfer in an E. coli cytological profiling dataset, AURA recovers the active antibiotic combination with 95.47% exact-match accuracy.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

SMART: Scalable Mesh-free Aerodynamic Simulations from Raw Geometries using a Transformer-based Surrogate Model

Machine learning-based surrogate models have emerged as more efficient alternatives to numerical solvers for physical simulations over complex geometries, such as car bodies. Many existing models incorporate the simulation mesh as an additional input, thereby reducing prediction errors. However, generating a simulation mesh for new geometries is computationally costly. In contrast, mesh-free methods, which do not rely on the simulation mesh, typically incur higher errors. Motivated by these considerations, we introduce SMART, a neural surrogate model that predicts physical quantities at arbitrary query locations using only a point-cloud representation of the geometry, without requiring access to the simulation mesh. The geometry and simulation parameters are encoded into a shared latent space that captures both structural and parametric characteristics of the physical field. A physics decoder then attends to the encoder's intermediate latent representations to map spatial queries to physical quantities. Through this cross-layer interaction, the model jointly updates latent geometric features and the evolving physical field. Extensive experiments show that SMART is competitive with and often outperforms existing methods that rely on the simulation mesh as input, demonstrating its capabilities for industry-level simulations.

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

Many-body chirality of topological stabilizer states

arXiv:2606.20472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A defining feature of chirality is the distinction between a system and its mirror image. Despite extensive experimental observations of chiral phases and theoretical advances, a quantum-information theoretic characterization of chirality based solely on the entanglement structure of many-body quantum states remains elusive. Here, we introduce the notion of many-body chirality by formulating it as an obstruction to transforming a quantum state into its complex conjugate through finite-depth local operations. We rigorously establish many-body chirality for stabilizer realizations of $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ anyon theories, proving that complex conjugation can be implemented by local quantum channels if and only if the underlying anyon data are mirror invariant. This reveals forms of chirality that evade conventional diagnostics, including examples with vanishing modular commutator, vanishing chiral central charge, and commuting-projector realizations. We further show that this obstruction is intrinsically four-partite, while invisible to tripartite entanglement structure. Finally, we prove that $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ states with $d>2$ possess intrinsic many-body imaginarity: their complex phase structure cannot be removed by finite-depth local unitaries. Remarkably, this includes states that are not many-body chiral.

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

Evaluating Second-Order Bias of LLMs Through Epistemic Entitlement

Evaluations of social bias in LLMs largely focus on whether models generate or imply biased content. However, as LLMs are increasingly used as judges of bias, they may exhibit social biases in subtler ways in how they evaluate biased content, which current methods do not systematically capture. We call this second-order bias: social bias in an LLM's judgment about social bias, which we evaluate through a novel, philosophically grounded reasoning task. Drawing on entitlement epistemology, we conceptualize bias as misplaced foundational knowledge that shapes an agent's rational inquiry, and derive a logical reasoning task for LLMs to judge to whom a biased text is acceptable or non-acceptable. We develop two simple metrics to measure how biased LLM judges are in inferring demographics for acceptability without sufficient support, and how these inferences vary across groups targeted by biased texts. Evaluating open and closed models, we find that our task evades safety guardrails by surfacing bias in model judgment. It varies systematically across target groups, reflects implicit social maps, and shows how models are still triggered by demographic labels. Our work points to the need for LLM bias evaluation in judgment tasks and broadly, for more theoretically grounded approaches to bias evaluation in NLP. We release our code and model responses at https://github.com/uofthcdslab/second-order-bias.

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

MemPO: Self-Memory Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agents

arXiv:2603.00680v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-horizon agents face the challenge of growing context size during interaction with environment, which degrades the performance and stability. Existing methods typically introduce the external memory module and look up the relevant information from the stored memory, which prevents the model itself from proactively managing its memory content and aligning with the agent's overarching task objectives. To address these limitations, we propose the self-memory policy optimization algorithm (MemPO), which enables the agent (policy model) to autonomously summarize and manage their memory during interaction with environment. By improving the credit assignment mechanism based on memory effectiveness, the policy model can selectively retain crucial information, significantly reducing token consumption while preserving task performance. Extensive experiments and analyses confirm that MemPO achieves absolute F1 score gains of 25.98 over the base model and 7.1 over the previous SOTA baseline, while reducing token usage by 67.58% and 73.12%. The code is released at https://github.com/TheNewBeeKing/MemPO.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

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

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

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Apertus LLM Family Expansion via Distillation and Quantization

arXiv:2605.29128v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The wide adoption of LLMs has led to their use in great variety of applications and scenarios, such as chatbot assistants and data annotation, creating the need for the models to satisfy certain budget and hardware constraints. This has led to the trend of LLMs being released in batches consisting of similar models of various sizes for the family of models to adhere to as wide of a range of constraints as possible. In this paper, we validate distillation and quantization as a cost-effective way to expand model families to new sizes and hardware formats. Based on the open-recipe Apertus 8B LLM, we produce Apertus-v1.1 - a distilled family of models with up to 4B parameters trained on 1.7T permissive license tokens. We demonstrate cost-efficiency and strong accuracy performance of our approach for covering large ranges of hardware and systems requirements.

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

Assessing Reliability of Symbol Detection in Concept Bottleneck Models

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) are a relevant tool for explainable Artificial Intelligence because they make their predictions through human-interpretable symbols. However, high task accuracy does not guarantee that these symbols are detected faithfully: jointly trained CBMs may encode task-specific shortcuts in the bottleneck, making their explanations unreliable. In this paper, we study concept-detection reliability by swapping independently trained concept detectors and classification heads that share the same symbolic vocabulary. We use the resulting performance degradation, concept-level metrics, and symbol-wise uncertainty estimates to identify concepts that are especially prone to spurious firing. Finally, we propose a reliability-aware training strategy in which a shared concept detector is optimized with multiple classification heads and penalized for relying on globally or instance-wise unreliable symbols. On CUB-200-2011 with full concept supervision, detectors and heads are almost freely interchangeable (swap drop below one accuracy point, relative retention above $99\%$, and no concept detected below chance), whereas on a controlled synthetic task we show that, as the concept-supervision weight is reduced, models keep near-perfect task accuracy while swapped accuracy and agreement with the ground-truth concepts collapse to chance. Our reliability-aware training substantially mitigates this leakage, roughly doubling swap accuracy in the leaky regime.

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

Quantum Reservoir Computing for Short-Term Power Load Forecasting in Resource-Constrained Energy Systems

arXiv:2606.12806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Short-term load forecasting is essential for reliable energy management, but practical deployment on edge devices requires models that remain accurate under limited memory, finite measurement budgets, and hardware noise. This work proposes a hardware-efficient Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) framework for energy load forecasting, where a fixed quantum reservoir transforms temporal input windows into high-dimensional features and only a classical Elastic Net readout is trained. To reduce deployment cost, the trained readout is compressed using post-training fixed-point quantization at bit widths from 8 to 2 bits. The framework is evaluated on the Tetouan and Spain energy load datasets under exact statevector simulation, 512-shot finite sampling, and realistic hardware-noise models from IBM FakeTorino and IBM FakeMarrakesh. Results show that 6-bit readout precision preserves full-precision forecasting performance while reducing readout memory by 81.2%. Below this point, degradation becomes dataset dependent, with Tetouan showing stronger sensitivity and Spain degrading more gradually. Hardware-noise validation further shows that the trained readout transfers to noisy reservoir states without retraining. These findings support quantized QRC as a resource-aware forecasting approach for near-term quantum time-series applications.

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

ProGRank: Probe-Gradient Reranking to Defend Dense-Retriever RAG from Corpus Poisoning

arXiv:2603.22934v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves large language model applications by grounding generation in retrieved evidence, but also introduces corpus poisoning as a new attack surface. In this setting, an adversary injects or edits passages so that they enter the Top-$K$ results for target queries and influence downstream generation. Existing defences often rely on content filtering, auxiliary models, or generator-side reasoning, which complicates deployment. We propose ProGRank, a post hoc, training-free retriever-side defence for dense-retriever RAG. ProGRank stress-tests each query–passage pair under mild randomized perturbations, extracts probe gradients from a small fixed parameter subset, and derives two instability signals: representational consistency and dispersion risk. It then combines these signals with a score gate for reranking. ProGRank preserves the original passage content, requires no retraining, and supports a surrogate-based variant when the deployed retriever is unavailable. Experiments across datasets, retrievers, attacks, and retrieval-stage and end-to-end settings show that ProGRank improves robustness and maintains a favorable robustness–utility trade-off, including under adaptive evasive attacks.

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

Towards Direct Latent-Space Synthesis for Parallel Branches in LLM-Agent Workflows

Large language models increasingly serve as execution engines for agentic systems, yet they still consume context through a sequential text interface. This creates a mismatch with modern structured agent workflows, in which independent branches explore subtasks, retrieve evidence, or generate candidate solutions before a final synthesis step. Existing systems typically merge these branches by concatenating their textual outputs, which discards the parallel structure and incurs redundant prefill computation. In this work, we introduce Parallel-Synthesis, a plug-and-play framework that enables a synthesizer to directly consume the KV caches produced by parallel worker agents. Parallel-Synthesis combines a cache mapper that calibrates independently generated branch caches with a fine-tuned synthesizer adapter that enables generation from this non-sequential cache interface. We train Parallel-Synthesis using data that exposes the synthesizer to parallel cache contexts, teaches aggregation across cached branches, and distills reasoning behavior from standard text-concatenation-based synthesis. Across nine downstream datasets spanning math, science QA, code generation, GAIA, and multi-agent database diagnosis, Parallel-Synthesis matches or outperforms text-based synthesis on seven datasets and remains close on the other two. It also reduces time-to-first-token by 2.5x-11x, suggesting that direct cache-based synthesis is a promising interface for more native and efficient synthesis over parallel agent branches.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mask Proposal Voting Based on Geodesic Framework for Robust Image Segmentation

Despite great advances, finding accurate segmentation remains a challenging task, especially in scenarios with cluttered backgrounds, complex intensity variations and topology appearance. Minimal path models have exhibited their strong ability in addressing image segmentation tasks. However, the performance of minimal paths-based segmentation approaches is heavily influenced by model initialization, hence limiting their application scope in practice. In this work, we propose a novel mask proposal voting framework that overcomes the major drawback of classical approaches, allowing robust segmentation even in complicated scenarios. Firstly, we introduce an efficient method for constructing adaptive domain cuts as a constraint for initializing the region-based min-cut evolution, by which diverse and reliable mask proposal candidates can be generated, substantially increasing the possibility of accurately covering the objective region by these proposals. Secondly, we propose a new mask voting scheme to build a voting score map encoding the final segmentation information. In contrast to classical path voting methods, our model allows incorporating priors to assign different importance to each individual mask. As a consequence, the proposed segmentation model is capable of accurately delineating object boundaries under complex scenarios, and is insensitive to initialization. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art minimal path-based approaches in both accuracy and robustness.

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

Entropy-Gated Latent Recursion

arXiv:2606.16620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling has become the dominant lever for improving language-model reasoning, but existing methods derive rollout diversity from a single source: stochastic token-level sampling. We argue that this single-axis sampling space is fundamentally limiting, and identify a second, fully deterministic and complementary axis: the layer span $L$ at which a frozen model's top decoder layers are recursively re-applied at high-uncertainty tokens. Different choices of $L$ produce distinct rollouts that solve different subsets of problems, with no stochasticity. We instantiate this axis through Entropy-Gated Latent Recursion (EGLR), a training-free decoding procedure that re-applies the top-$L$ layers for at most $K_{\max}$ iterations until the next-token distribution converges. Combined with $T$ temperature samples, EGLR turns a single-axis stochastic rollout pool into an $L\times T$ Cartesian sampling space at almost the same per-rollout cost. We characterize this space across $8$ instruction-tuned models and $6$ math reasoning benchmarks, and show that the $L$-axis is genuinely complementary to temperature: on MATH-500 with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, the joint $L\times T$ oracle reaches $91.6\%$, $+8.2$ percentage points beyond the temperature-only oracle ($83.4\%$) and $+10.4$ points beyond the layer-only oracle ($81.2\%$), confirming that the two axes capture genuinely complementary problems. The expanded rollout pool provides richer per-prompt candidates for any downstream procedure that consumes rollouts, including self-consistency, best-of-$N$ with verifiers, and group-relative RL training (GRPO), opening a new direction for inference-time scaling that does not rely on stochastic noise.

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

DiagFlowBench: Evaluating How Language Models Handle Off-Procedure Inputs in Grounded Diagnostic Dialogue

arXiv:2606.17904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly serve as advisory systems in maintenance operations. To prevent hallucination, recent systems ground these models in procedural documentation to constrain them to approved steps. In practice, however, operator queries frequently stray from this path, requiring models to recognise out-of-scope inputs mid-conversation, a dynamic that current benchmarks rarely prioritise. We introduce DiagFlowBench, a dataset of 50 industrial diagnostic flowcharts from a consumer manufacturer converted into 1,676 multi-turn conversations that contrast compliant with out-of-scope utterances. Evaluating a panel of ten commercial and open-weight models reveals high variability in abstention rates, with models commonly selecting a real but contextually inadequate step rather than fabricating facts. The inherent plausibility and authority of this mapped but wrong advice exposes a challenging vulnerability for grounding systems.

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

AI Economist Agent: An Agentic Framework for Model-Grounded Economic Analysis with RAG, Knowledge Graphs, and Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.20041v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a model-grounded RAG-based AI economist with an agentic framework for economic scenario analysis using large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs. While LLMs can generate fluent economic narratives, economists are often required to make economic claims grounded by economic theory and real-world data. Based on this motivation, this study proposes an RAG-based AI economist, which utilizes knowledge graphs including economic data and theory and LLM-based agents to plan the analysis, retrieve relevant evidence, select appropriate models, and generate reports. In our framework, we do not produce quantitative claims directly with the language model alone; instead, we generate narratives grounded in explicit model-based computations and linked to the retrieved evidence via AI agents. We refer to our framework as an AI economist agent. We evaluate the AI economist agent in two applications: economist report generation for U.S. inflation persistence and Federal Reserve policy, and bank stress-test narrative generation for U.S. commercial real estate refinancing stress. The results illustrate how grounding the generated reports improves their economic coherence and traceability.

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

Not Truly Multilingual: Script Consistency as a Missing Dimension in VLM Evaluation

Current multilingual evaluations for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) assume a one-to-one mapping between language and orthography, overlooking billions of users of multi-script languages. We introduce PuMVR (Punjabi Multimodal Visual Reasoning), a benchmark of 1,000 strictly parallel image-text instances across Punjabi's three active scripts: Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi, and Roman. Evaluating 10 state-of-the-art VLMs, we expose a substantial and systematic Script Gap. Models frequently solve visual tasks in one script while failing identical tasks in another, with accuracy deltas reaching 16%. Crucially, visual input boosts absolute performance uniformly yet does not close the orthographic gap. Furthermore, cross-script in-context transfer is highly brittle, exposing script-locked knowledge representation. Supported by McNemar tests across all script pairs, our findings demonstrate that current "multilingual" VLMs are not truly multi-script. We propose the Script Consistency Rate (SCR), which falls as low as 24.8% on our benchmark, as a mandatory metric for script-agnostic evaluation to ensure equitable AI access. Data and code are available at: https://github.com/prabhjotschugh/Not-Truly-Multilingual-PuMVR.

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

Transformers Learn the Mestre-Nagao Heuristic

arXiv:2606.15036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We train a two-layer transformer encoder to classify rational elliptic curves $E/\mathbb{Q}$ of conductor $\leq 10000$ as either rank 0 or rank 1 from the first 128 normalized Frobenius traces. We achieve >99% accuracy on both classes, and accuracy is essentially unchanged on test curves with no isogeny or quadratic-twist relative in the training set. We then apply techniques from mechanistic interpretability such as attention analysis, linear probing, activation patching, logit attribution, and neuron-level circuit analysis to reverse-engineer the algorithm the (centroid in function space) model learned. We find that a sparse circuit of 20 out of 512 layer-1 MLP neurons is sufficient for rank prediction under a linear probe with an AUROC of 0.992 at plateau, implementing a push-pull detector architecture of rank-0 and rank-1 detectors with a one-sided readout. However, we notice that the model has sub-optimal readout problems indicating a mismatch in rank-order between the readout pathway and the discriminative circuit. Critically, the learned input weights of the top discriminating neuron match the Mestre-Nagao sum heuristic weights $\log(p)/(p\cdot \log{B})$ with a Spearman coefficient $r = 0.997$ and Pearson coefficient $r = 0.952$: the model has learnt a result from analytic number theory from the Frobenius trace data alone. We additionally find that all 50 independently trained models concentrate CLS attention on prime positions at 2-50$\times$ the rate of composite positions. The CLS embedding encodes $\log{L(E,1)}$ with $R^2 = 0.962\pm 0.011$ across the 50 models (after controlling for the conductor). Activation patching analysis reveals that attention weights are dissociated from causal information flow. Additionally, the 50 solutions from training are near-identical in function space (with pairwise agreement $>$98.8%) despite large weight space barriers.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Operator Calculus for Population-Based Optimization: A Mean-Field Convergence Theory

arXiv:2606.14289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Population-based and distributional optimization methods, from evolution strategies and consensus-based optimization to covariance-matrix adaptation and stochastic gradient methods viewed as distributional dynamics, are widely used for nonconvex or black-box problems, yet their convergence analyses remain fragmented across algorithm-specific techniques. We introduce an operator calculus in which a broad class of such methods, after choosing an appropriate state space and, where necessary, augmenting the state by memory or strategy variables, is described as a composition of three elementary operators (mutation, selection, and recombination) acting on probability measures. Under explicit stability and regularity conditions, the composite operator admits a pre-generator whose continuous-time limit is a transport-reaction-jump (TRJ) PDE that preserves the operator splitting. On this foundation we establish a modular Lyapunov principle. If a state-space Lyapunov function both dissipates under the full generator and controls the relevant search-space gauges, then the state-space Lyapunov functional and the induced search errors decay exponentially. The additive generator structure allows dissipation estimates to be assembled operator by operator, providing a toolkit for certifying convergence of composite mean-field algorithms.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

UI2Code^N: UI-to-Code Generation as Interactive Visual Optimization

UI-to-code aims to translate UI screenshots into executable front-end code. Despite progress with vision-language models (VLMs), most existing methods formulate UI-to-code as a single-pass generation, which mismatches real-world UI development that is inherently iterative and feedback-driven. We reformulate UI-to-code as an interactive visual optimization problem, where code generation is embedded in a closed-loop process of execution, visual inspection, and iterative refinement driven by rendered visual feedback. To address the non-differentiability of visual objectives and the noise of absolute visual evaluators, we propose Relative Visual Policy Optimization (RVPO), a preference-based reinforcement learning method that optimizes relative visual rankings among rendered candidates under execution feedback. We instantiate this paradigm in UI2Code^N, an open-source 9B model trained via continual pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on UI drafting, UI polishing, and UI editing benchmarks, even outperforming larger models, with performance consistently improving through iterative visual optimization. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/zai-org/UI2Code_N.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

How Post-Training Shapes Biological Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.16517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific reasoning models for biology combine language models with foundation models trained on multimodal biological data, including DNA, RNA, and proteins. These models are built through post-training, yet how each stage shapes reasoning and generalization remains poorly understood. We study when post-training improves performance and when it induces over-specialization. Across genomics, transcriptomics, and proteins, we train and evaluate more than 100 biological reasoning models under controlled variation in backbone, continued pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL), measuring both in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) performance. We find that each post-training stage reshapes generalization in a distinct way rather than contributing uniform gains. CPT improves downstream performance by aligning models with biological language. SFT consistently increases ID performance but causes OOD performance to peak early and decline as models fit the training distribution. RL, when applied to strong SFT checkpoints with aligned rewards, improves OOD performance and partially recovers generalization. These results show that biological reasoning does not improve monotonically with additional supervision or compute. Instead, performance depends on how training stages are composed. Under fixed post-training budgets, the strongest ID-OOD trade-off comes from brief SFT, larger RL allocations, and asymmetric adaptation capacity across stages.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Hard or Just Unreached? Diagnosing the Sampling Blind Spot in Math-Reasoning Difficulty Estimation

arXiv:2606.19636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Math and science reasoning benchmarks rely on pass@k, the fraction of sampled chains that reach gold, as the canonical per-example difficulty signal. The same signal drives RL with verifiable rewards, math data curation, synthetic curricula, and verifier training. We show this proxy has a persistent blind spot on its hardest stratum: on the eight free-form math cells we test (GSM8K and MATH across four open-weight models), 10.3-22.9% of the examples that no sampling seed solves in six tries are instead solved at matched compute by a six-chain deterministic regime. These are greedy decoding plus five cheap residual-stream perturbations applied via activation grafting, while greedy alone solves at most 6% on these math cells. Recovery scales with the additional budget, across perturbations whose mechanistic distinctness we verify across all twelve cells (cross-kind fix-set Jaccard

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Differential DNA Methylation and Delirium After Anesthesia and Surgery

Background: DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification that regulates gene expression in response to environmental exposures. We measured differential DNA methylation levels in blood before after general anesthesia and surgery in participants with and without postoperative delirium (POD) and postoperative neurocognitive disorder (PNCD). Methods: Blood sampling, delirium assessment and cognitive testing were prospectively performed at baseline before non-cardiac, non-neurologic surgery, and at 24 hours (24h) and 6 weeks (6wk) thereafter in 94 participants comprising 13 with POD and 81 without POD, and 40 with PNCD and 54 without PNCD 6wk after surgery who were matched for age and sex in the INTUIT and MADCO cohorts. DNA methylation was assessed using the Illumina Infinium MethylationEPIC Beadchip. Results: 132 differentially methylated positions (DMPs) annotated to 198 differentially methylated genes (DMGs) were identified in 94 participants 24h after surgery compared to baseline with a local false discovery rate (LFDR)