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.CV) 2026-06-19

CMDS-AD: Cross-Modal Dual-Stream Decoupling for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Few-shot anomaly detection remains challenging due to limited training data. Multi-modal anomaly detection (MAD) offers a viable solution, leveraging 3D geometric cues to enrich 2D RGB representations and compensate for this scarcity. However, existing MAD methods apply spatially uniform feature processing, conflating stable macroscopic structures with high-frequency localized defect signals, exacerbating cross-modal misalignment and inflating false-positive rates. To overcome this, we present CMDS-AD, a Cross-Modal Dual-Stream Anomaly Detection framework. A LoRA-guided diffusion model generates diverse RGB samples to mitigate extreme data scarcity. For 3D normal augmentation, we employ a pre-trained diffusion model as a normal estimator. Crucially, this estimator inherently acts as a non-linear low-pass filter, directly extracting low-frequency normal representations from RGB inputs. This establishes an auxiliary estimated stream of purely low-frequency information, anchoring robust structural templates and assisting the uncompressed real stream, containing coupled high- and low-frequency components, to precisely isolate micro-defects. A Coordinate-Aware Hierarchical Feature Mapper adaptively aligns cross-modal semantics, while a multiplicative scoring mechanism filters modality-specific noise. Under the extreme 1-shot setting, CMDS-AD achieves absolute performance gains of 5.7% (I-AUROC) and 2.0% (AUPRO) on MVTec 3D-AD, alongside 7.7% and 5.6% improvements on EyeCandies, establishing a new state-of-the-art.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Spatial Localization of Relativistic Quantum Systems: The Commutativity Requirement and the Locality Principle. Part II: A Model from Local QFT

arXiv:2604.04173v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper is the second and final part of a two-part study. We construct positive-energy relativistic spatial localization observables in Minkowski spacetime within standard quantum field theory, using the stress–energy–momentum tensor smeared with suitable test functions. For each fixed timelike direction, the construction gives positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on spacelike hypersurfaces, well defined on every $n$-particle sector and satisfying a relativistic causality condition excluding superluminal propagation of detection probabilities. The observables are built from local or quasi-local field-theoretic quantities, thus providing a rigorous version of earlier heuristic proposals. In the one-particle sector, the construction reduces to the observable previously introduced by the author, and its first moment gives the Newton–Wigner position operator under appropriate normalization and centering assumptions. Because the Reeh–Schlieder theorem prevents the normally ordered stress–energy–momentum tensor from being positive on the full Fock space, we use quantum energy inequalities to obtain lower bounds controlling deviations from positivity. This leads to regularized operator families, bounded from below, which approximate the localization effects. Finally, we define conditional localization observables for finite laboratories through modified local energy operators. By Haag duality, the corresponding conditional POVMs belong to local von Neumann algebras and commute for causally separated regions, in accordance with the Araki–Haag–Kastler framework. The results show how commutativity of localization observables is recovered for conditional measurements in finite spacetime regions.

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

Experimental violation of a Bell-like inequality for causal order

arXiv:2506.20516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum mechanics is compatible with scenarios where physical processes happen in an indefinite order. In theory, this feature could be detected through violations of inequalities on the observed correlations, analogous to Bell inequalities. However, experimental demonstrations of such violations have been missing until recently due to the complexity of the required setup. Here we report an experimental violation of a Bell-like inequality involving the correlations of four parties, one of which is spacelike separated from the others. Our demonstration employs 3 km fiber spools to simulate spacelike separation, and achieves high-speed operations in photonic time-bin encoding, nanosecond synchronization, and accurate temperature stabilization. These experimental advances enable a violation by 5.7 standard deviations and open a path towards a certification of indefinite order in conditions that guarantee spacelike separation with existing state-of-the-art devices. However, the certification is not device-independent, as it relies on knowledge about the setup to exclude bidirectional signaling–a loophole inherent to implementations in classical acyclic spacetimes, which may be resolved in future quantum-spacetime tests.

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

Fin-RATE: A Real-world Financial Analytics and Tracking Evaluation Benchmark for LLMs on SEC Filings

arXiv:2602.07294v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With the increasing deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the finance domain, LLMs are increasingly expected to parse complex regulatory disclosures. However, existing benchmarks often focus on isolated details, failing to reflect the complexity of professional analysis that requires synthesizing information across multiple documents, reporting periods, and corporate entities. Furthermore, these benchmarks do not disentangle whether errors arise from retrieval failures, generation inaccuracies, domain-specific reasoning mistakes, or misinterpretation of the query or context, making it difficult to precisely diagnose performance bottlenecks. To bridge these gaps, we introduce Fin-RATE, a benchmark built on U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and mirroring financial analyst workflows through three pathways: detail-oriented reasoning within individual disclosures, cross-entity comparison under shared topics, and longitudinal tracking of the same firm across reporting periods. We benchmark 17 leading LLMs, spanning open-source, closed-source, and finance-specialized models, under both ground-truth context and retrieval-augmented settings. Results show substantial performance degradation, with accuracy dropping by 18.60% and 14.35% as tasks shift from single-document reasoning to longitudinal and cross-entity analysis. This degradation is associated with increased comparison hallucinations, temporal and entity mismatches, and is further reflected in declines in reasoning quality and factual consistency–limitations that existing benchmarks have yet to formally categorize or quantify.

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

AMALIA-VL: A Native European Portuguese Open-Source Vision and Language Model

Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet European Portuguese (pt-PT) remains systematically underserved by existing open-source multimodal models, which either conflate it with Brazilian Portuguese or severely under-represent it in their training data mixes. We introduce AMALIA-VL, the first open-source instruction-tuned LVLM built natively for pt-PT, pairing a high-resolution vision encoder with dynamic image tiling and a fully open pt-PT-optimized language model via a learned connector. We contribute with a purposefully designed three-stage training process - vision-language alignment, general visual instruction tuning, and preference optimization - together with a pt-PT-centric multimodal data mix combining curated and translated public datasets with novel datasets that address the near-total absence of European Portuguese multimodal resources. Our evaluation shows that AMALIA-VL establishes a strong baseline for open-source pt-PT LVLMs.We will release model weights, training data, and construction pipelines along with machine-translated pt-PT evaluation benchmarks to help democratize pt-PT LVLM development.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

BeetleAtlas 2: An enhanced <i>Tribolium castaneum</i> web resource for tissue and developmental transcriptomics allowing refinement of gene predictions

by David P. Leader, Muhammad T. Naseem, Janina L. Rinke, Kenneth Veland Halberg BeetleAtlas is an online resource for tissue- and stage-specific transcriptomics in the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum. On updating from the original Tcas5.2 genome assembly to the more recent improved icTriCast1.1 genome assembly it became evident that there were major discrepancies between the gene models of the two genome annotations in use: the OGS3 and the NCBI gene sets. As neither was clearly superior we implemented a new design in BeetleAtlas 2 (beetleatlas.org) comprising two parallel ‘modes’ — one incorporating results using the NCBI gene models and a second incorporating those using the OGS3 gene models. This allows direct comparison where equivalent gene models exist: 50–57% of cases. To aid resolution of discrepancies between the two gene model sets and verification of results, gene models are linked to a custom visualization of RNA-seq read coverage of the genome in the UCSC Genome Browser. This displays reads from 22 tissues and life stages superimposed on the icTriCast1.1 genome assembly. Reference tracks show the NCBI gene models, the OGS3 gene models after translation of their coordinates from the Tcas5.2 assembly, and 1050 discontinued NCBI gene models from the previous assembly after a similar transfer of coordinates. We document various situations in which distinct patterns of expression of the tissues can be used to confirm and extend correlations between the two gene sets, resolve discrepancies between them, make corrections and identify putative genes or exons absent from the current gene sets. BeetleAtlas 2 allows those involved in Tribolium research to avoid the pitfalls inherent in incorrect gene models when planning experiments on specific genes and interpreting the results. It also demonstrates how BeetleAtlas 2 might play an important role in establishing a revised gene set for Tribolium castaneum in the future.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Mem-World: Memory-Augmented Action-Conditioned World Models for Persistent Robot Manipulation

Action-conditioned world models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot learning, offering a scalable alternative to costly real-world experimentation by generating action-consistent video rollouts. However, persistent world modeling remains challenging in manipulation: frequent end-effector occlusions and rapid wrist-camera motion make the current observation insufficient for predicting future views, causing models to forget or hallucinate scene details seen in earlier frames. Existing memory retrieval strategies often fail to identify informative history in dynamic manipulation scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose Mem-World, a memory-augmented multi-view action-conditioned world model. At its core, we present W-VMem, a 4D wrist-view-centered surfel-indexed memory that anchors historical observations to temporally evolving surface elements. By explicitly modeling when and where scene elements are observed, W-VMem enables geometry-aware retrieval of relevant history frames conditioned on future actions. During generation, relevant history frames are selected via surfel-based rendering and scoring, providing informative and non-redundant context for prediction. Extensive experiments show that Mem-World generates persistent rollouts in complex manipulation scenarios, enables more reliable policy evaluation than Ctrl-World, improving the Pearson correlation with real-world performance by 14.5\%, and supports effective policy improvement through synthetic data generation, increasing success rates from 58\% to 72\% on long-horizon tasks.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

AerialClaw: An Open-Source Framework for LLM-Driven Autonomous Aerial Agents

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in inspection, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and emergency response. However, most UAV applications still rely on pre-defined command sequences or task-specific pipelines, where developers manually connect perception, planning, flight control, simulation, logging, and safety modules. This limits the flexibility, reproducibility, and extensibility of autonomous aerial systems. This paper presents AerialClaw, an open-source software framework that enables UAVs to operate as decision-making aerial agents rather than merely command-following platforms. Given a natural-language mission, AerialClaw allows an LLM-based agent to understand the task, maintain context, invoke executable aerial skills, observe perception and runtime feedback, and iteratively update its decisions in a closed loop. The framework adopts a modular brain-skill-runtime architecture, combining hard skills for atomic UAV operations, Markdown-based soft skills for reusable task strategies, document-driven agent state and capability boundaries, memory-driven reflection, safety-oriented runtime validation, and platform-agnostic execution adapters. AerialClaw supports lightweight mock execution, PX4 SITL with Gazebo, and AirSim-based simulation, together with a web console, pluggable model backends, example missions, simulation assets, and staged deployment scripts. By combining standardized aerial skills, document-driven agent state, memory, and closed-loop LLM decision-making, AerialClaw provides a reproducible and extensible open-source framework for building UAV systems that can interpret missions, make decisions, execute skills, and adapt their behavior from feedback.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CaricHarmony: Contrastive Diffusion Paths for Identity-Preserving Caricature Synthesis

Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause as condition signal contamination – competing probability distributions in the denoising trajectory that make balanced generation impossible. We present CaricHarmony, the first training-free method that explicitly resolves this contamination through parallel uncontaminated diffusion paths. During inference, we maintain three paths: $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i}}$ (pure identity), $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{s}}$ (pure shape), and $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ (harmonized output). Novel energy functions operating on cross-attention features provide gradient guidance that steers $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ toward optimal balance: $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{shape}}$ ensures sketch fidelity through layout and semantic alignment, while $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{id}}$ employs token-level correspondence matching robust to extreme distortions. Unlike DemoCaricature requiring 70 seconds per-identity fine-tuning or CaricatureBooth constrained to Bezier curves, CaricHarmony accepts any sketch format and generates in under 16 seconds. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 0.8615 shape CLIP score (vs. 0.8450) under comparable identity consistency score, with 7.81 overall user preference score (vs. 6.06). Our method fundamentally reconceptualizes the ID-shape conflict as conditioning signal contamination for diffusion models, enabling unprecedented creative control while preserving recognition.

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

PhysDrift: Bridging the Embodiment Gap in Humanoid Co-Speech Motion Generation

arXiv:2606.19935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid robots require co-speech motions that are not only expressive and speech-aligned, but also physically executable under embodiment constraints. Existing co-speech generation pipelines are predominantly human-centric: motions are first generated in human-body representations such as SMPL-X and subsequently retargeted to humanoid robots. In this work, we identify a fundamental embodiment gap in this paradigm, where the mismatch between human motion manifolds and humanoid embodiment constraints disrupts embodiment consistency during motion transfer and physical execution. Through extensive analysis, we show that although retargeting can preserve coarse motion semantics, it significantly compresses motion diversity and weakens prosody-motion synchronization, limiting expressive humanoid behaviors. To address this problem, we first propose IK-EER, a prosody-preserving humanoid motion curation framework that jointly optimizes kinematic feasibility and speech-motion temporal alignment during retargeting. Building upon the curated robot-native motion dataset, we further introduce PhysDrift, an embodiment-aware co-speech motion generation framework that directly predicts executable humanoid joint trajectories from speech without relying on intermediate human-body representations. Unlike conventional human-centric pipelines, PhysDrift maintains embodiment consistency throughout both training and inference while incorporating physical regularization to stabilize robot motion dynamics. Extensive experiments and real-world humanoid deployment demonstrate that embodiment-aware robot-native generation substantially improves speech-motion alignment, physical plausibility, motion smoothness, inference efficiency, and real-time interaction capability.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

When Tables Go Crazy: Evaluating Multimodal Models on French Financial Documents

Vision-language models (VLMs) perform well on many document understanding tasks, yet their reliability in specialized, non-English domains remains underexplored. This gap is especially critical in finance, where documents mix dense regulatory text, numerical tables, and visual charts, and where extraction errors can have real-world consequences. We introduce Scribe Finance, the first multimodal benchmark for evaluating French financial document understanding. The dataset contains 1,204 expert-validated questions spanning text extraction, table comprehension, chart interpretation, and multi-turn conversational reasoning, drawn from real investment prospectuses, KIDs, and PRIIPs. We evaluate six open-weight VLMs (8B-124B parameters) using an LLM-as-judge protocol. While models achieve strong performance on text and table tasks (85-90% accuracy), they struggle with chart interpretation (34-62%). Most notably, multi-turn dialogue reveals a sharp failure mode: early mistakes propagate across turns, driving accuracy down to roughly 50% regardless of model size. These results show that current VLMs are effective for well-defined extraction tasks but remain brittle in interactive, multi-step financial analysis. Scribe Finance offers a challenging benchmark to measure and drive progress in this high-stakes setting.

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

Query-Efficient Video Adversarial Attack with Stylized Logo on Service Computing

In service computing, video classification has become fundamental to many intelligent applications. While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance in recognizing video content, recent studies have shown that DNNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. Thus, understanding adversarial attacks can better respond to emergency situations. In order to improve attack performance, many style-transfer-based attacks and patch-based attacks have been proposed. However, the global perturbation of the former will bring unnatural global colors, while the latter is difficult to achieve success in targeted attacks due to the limited perturbation space. Moreover, compared to a plethora of methods targeting image classifiers, video adversarial attacks remain relatively underexplored. Therefore, to generate adversarial examples with a low budget and to provide them with a higher verisimilitude, we propose a novel black-box video attack framework, called Stylized Logo Attack (SLA). SLA is conducted through three stages. The first stage involves building a style reference set for logos, which can not only make the generated examples more natural, but also carry more target class features in targeted attacks. Then, Reinforcement Learning is employed to determine the style reference and position parameters of the logo within the video, which ensures that the stylized logo is placed in the video with optimal attributes. Finally, perturbations are optimized in a step-by-step manner so as to improve the fooling rate. Experimental results indicate that SLA can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods and still maintain good deception effects when facing various defense methods. We believe SLA can raise awareness among the security community about the reliability and security of video classification systems and serve as a memorandum of possible attack methods.

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

AI Receptivity or AI Adoption Breadth? A Tool-Specific Reanalysis of the Lower-Literacy/Higher-Usage Link

arXiv:2606.13734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent evidence reported by Tully, Longoni, and Appel (2025) suggests that lower artificial intelligence (AI) literacy predicts greater receptivity toward AI. We revisit this claim using the public data from Study 3 of that article, which measures past usage of five AI tool categories on a five-point frequency scale. We first reproduce the negative association between AI literacy and aggregate AI usage using OLS on participant-level averages, binary logit, ordered logit, and multinomial logit specifications. We then show that the aggregate relationship masks substantial heterogeneity by tool type. In our demographic-adjusted primary specification, AI literacy does not significantly predict text AI usage (ordered-logit $\beta$ = -0.090, p = .387), whereas it remains a strong predictor of non-text AI adoption ($\beta$ = -0.377, p < .001). The non-text effect is also robust under Tully et al.'s original Study 3 control specification ($\beta$ = -0.502, p < .001). Binary, ordered-logit, and multinomial specifications suggest that the non-text relationship is primarily an adoption/non-adoption pattern rather than evidence of intensive use: the demographic-adjusted odds ratio of ever having used a non-text AI tool is 0.68. Thus, in the study that measures self-reported past usage rather than stated preferences, the evidence does not support a simple claim that lower AI literacy predicts greater receptivity to AI in general. It points instead to a narrower pattern of broader adoption across lower-penetration, non-text AI tools.

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

StarOR: Synergizing Tree Search and Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Optimization Modeling

arXiv:2606.15197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimization modeling is inherently hierarchical, requiring a precise sequence of symbolic commitments. Traditional learning-based automated optimization modeling methods improve modeling policies through large-scale annotated or curated training data, but are costly to adapt to new problem distributions. Meanwhile, one-shot generation remains brittle in hierarchical modeling, where early symbolic errors can propagate into invalid formulations. Test-time scaling offers a promising alternative by enabling structural exploration with additional instance-level computation; however, existing search-based methods typically rely on a fixed policy, causing repeated rollouts to inherit similar modeling biases and providing limited credit assignment for intermediate decisions. To address these limitations, we propose StarOR, a synergistic search-and-adaptation framework that couples MCTS with Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for optimization modeling. StarOR decomposes the modeling process into four stages and updates a transient LoRA adapter via GRPO at each non-terminal node. By using MCTS-generated siblings as local comparison sets, StarOR transforms search-time exploration into instance-specific policy refinement. Moreover, an unsupervised multi-faceted reward system provides fine-grained feedback for intermediate formulation decisions without ground-truth labels. Experiments across five optimization benchmarks show that StarOR achieves state-of-the-art performance even with a 4B backbone, outperforming existing methods and the frontier LLMs.

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

Inhomogeneous Light-Matter Coupling as a Resource for Noiseless Quantum Memories

arXiv:2605.26783v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inhomogeneous ensembles of two-level systems are central to both fundamental light-matter physics and quantum-network applications. Understanding and optimizing ensemble-based quantum memories and entanglement protocols requires a unified framework that describes how to store quantum states of light as collective matter excitations and retrieve them on demand. Here we develop such a framework, the waveguide model, by mapping the dark collective modes of the ensemble onto an effective waveguide with well-defined input-output relations, valid in both the weak-excitation regime and near population inversion. This model reveals that inhomogeneous coupling – often regarded as a limitation – is instead the physical origin of noisy-echo suppression by adiabatic pulses, a key ingredient for realizing noiseless quantum memories. For entanglement generation, the same mechanism exposes a previously unexplored shortcoming of robust control pulses and leads to a new composite-pulse protocol that overcomes it. These results establish the waveguide model as a practical bridge between fundamental collective physics and quantum-network protocol design, recasting inhomogeneous coupling from an obstacle into a control knob for collective emission.

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

Robust Privacy: Inference-Stage Privacy through Certified Robustness

arXiv:2601.17360v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adversary observing a model's released prediction can infer sensitive attributes of the queried input, or even reconstruct representatives of the model's training data. The inference interface thus acts as a side channel for privacy leakage. We introduce Robust Privacy (RP), an inference-stage privacy notion inspired by certified robustness: if a model's prediction is provably invariant within a radius-R neighborhood around an input x with confidence at least $1-\alpha$, then x enjoys $(R,\alpha)$-Robust Privacy, under which we prove that any adversary observing the released prediction has at most $\alpha/2$ advantage in distinguishing x from any input within distance R of x. Building on RP, we formalize Robust Attribute Privacy (RAP), an attribute-level privacy notion that characterizes the set of sensitive-attribute values that remain compatible with a released prediction. On a classification task, RP increases the median length of the RAP-compatible inference interval from 23.50 to 29.96, reducing attribute-inference precision. Model inversion attacks, often treated as a training-stage threat, in fact rely on fine-grained signals leaked through the inference interface; RP masks these signals at the inference stage, reducing attack success rate (ASR) from 73% to 4% on a black-box inversion attack. This direct targeting of the leakage channel enables RP to dominate DP-SGD and randomized response in the privacy-utility tradeoff space: RP retains 98.4% accuracy at 21% ASR, whereas DP-SGD must drop accuracy to 61.7% to reach a comparable ASR. Across both experiments, increasing the smoothing sample size N strengthens privacy and improves utility together. Finally, we examine model distillation as a scope boundary and show that RP mitigates attribute-level and instance-level inference-stage privacy leakage, but not function-level extraction through model distillation.

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

From Seeing to Experiencing: Scaling Navigation Foundation Models with Reinforcement Learning

Navigation foundation models trained on massive web-scale data enable agents to generalize across diverse environments and embodiments. However, these models, which are trained solely on offline data, often lack the capacity to reason about the consequences of their actions or adapt through counterfactual understanding. They thus face significant limitations in real-world urban navigation, where interactive and safe behaviors, such as avoiding obstacles and moving pedestrians, are critical. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Seeing-to-Experiencing (S2E) learning framework to scale the capability of navigation foundation models with reinforcement learning. S2E combines the strengths of pretraining on offline videos and post-training through reinforcement learning. It maintains the model's generalizability acquired from large-scale real-world videos while enhancing its interactivity through reinforcement learning in simulation environments. Specifically, we introduce two innovations: (1) an Anchor-Guided Distribution Matching strategy for offline pretraining, which stabilizes learning and models diverse motion patterns through anchor-based supervision; and (2) a Residual-Attention Module for reinforcement learning, which obtains reactive behaviors from simulation environments without erasing the model's pretrained knowledge. Moreover, we establish a comprehensive end-to-end evaluation benchmark, NavBench-GS, built on photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructions of real-world scenes that incorporate physical interactions. It can systematically assess the generalizability and safety of navigation foundation models.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Mitigating Disparate Impact of Differentially Private Learning through Bounded Adaptive Clipping

arXiv:2506.01396v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) has become an essential framework for privacy-preserving machine learning. Existing DP learning methods, however, often have disparate impacts on model predictions, e.g., for minority groups. Gradient clipping, which is often used in DP learning, can suppress larger gradients from challenging samples. We show that this problem is amplified by adaptive clipping, which will often shrink the clipping bound to tiny values to match a well-fitting majority, while significantly reducing the accuracy for others. We propose bounded adaptive clipping, which introduces a tunable lower bound to prevent excessive gradient suppression. Our method improves worst-class accuracy by over 10 percentage points on Skewed and Fashion MNIST compared to unbounded adaptive clipping, 7 points compared to Automatic clipping, and 5 points compared to constant clipping. The code is available at https://github.com/TrustworthyMLHelsinki/adaptive-clipping-fairness.

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

Can Agents Distinguish Visually Hard-to-Separate Diseases in a Zero-Shot Setting? A Pilot Study

The rapid progress of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has led to increasing interest in agent-based systems. While most prior work in medical imaging concentrates on automating routine clinical workflows, we study an underexplored yet clinically significant setting: distinguishing visually hard-to-separate diseases in a zero-shot setting. We benchmark representative agents on two imaging-only proxy diagnostic tasks, (1) melanoma vs. atypical nevus and (2) pulmonary edema vs. pneumonia, where visual features are highly confounded despite substantial differences in clinical management. We introduce a multi-agent framework based on contrastive adjudication. Experimental results show improved diagnostic performance (an 11-percentage-point gain in accuracy on dermoscopy data) and reduced unsupported claims on qualitative samples, although overall performance remains insufficient for clinical deployment. We acknowledge the inherent uncertainty in human annotations and the absence of clinical context, which further limit the translation to real-world settings. Within this controlled setting, this pilot study provides preliminary insights into zero-shot agent performance in visually confounded scenarios.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Quenched and Annealed CLTs for the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment

arXiv:2510.11846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the asymptotic behavior of random dimer coverings of the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment. We investigate quenched limit theorems for the height function and we extend annealed limit theorems that were recently studied in [arXiv:2507.08560]. We consider more general choices of random edge weights (independence is not assumed) and we distinguish two cases where the random edge weights satisfy the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) under different scalings. For both cases, we prove convergence to the Gaussian Free Field for the quenched fluctuations. For the annealed version, it had been shown in [arXiv:2507.08560], that Gaussian Free Field fluctuations can be dominated by the much larger fluctuations of the random environment. To access quenched fluctuations we analyze the Schur process with random parameters in a way that allows to prove the annealed CLT for the height function for non i.i.d. weights. We consider specific examples where we determine the asymptotic fluctuations.

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

XAI-Grounded Explanation Generation for Speech Deepfake Detection with Training-Free Multimodal Large Language Models

Speech deepfake detection (SDD) systems require trustworthy explanations for reliable decision-making. Existing explanation ways mainly fall into two categories. Traditional explainable AI (XAI), such as gradient-based attribution, produces low-level attribution signals tightly coupled with model decisions, and harder to be understood by human than natural language explanations. Meanwhile, large language model (LLM)-based explanation generation often produces generic and ungrounded descriptions due to the lack of heuristic evidence and task-specific supervision, stemming from limited grounded explanation datasets for SDD. We therefore propose a training-free explanation framework that integrates XAI evidence with multimodal LLMs to generate grounded and specific explanations. Using the PartialSpoof dataset, we construct a grounded explanation dataset and show that methods with XAI increase inside accuracy by over 45\%, verified through human evaluation and faithfulness checks.

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

Dual-Stance Evaluation of Sycophancy: The Structure of Agreement and the Limits of Intervention

Activation steering can shift LLM behaviour, but standard evaluations do not typically test whether a sycophancy-reduction direction also suppresses agreement with factually correct statements. We introduce dual-stance evaluation, which tests both stances of each topic, and apply it to centroid-difference steering on Llama-3-8B-Instruct. We find a dissociation: the model represents sycophantic and factual agreement in geometrically distinct subspaces, yet the steering direction projects equally onto both and cannot differentially target either. The direction accordingly reduces agreement with factually correct statements (e.g. that the Earth is round) as well as sycophantic ones. All other static properties of the two activation groups are matched, suggesting the behavioural dissociation arises from generation dynamics or from finer-grained structure that residual-stream analysis cannot resolve. The pattern illustrates a general gap: representations that are readable from activations may not be writable through them.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A New Definition of Quantum Superposition

arXiv:2606.15607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The usual description of the superposition of two (pure quantum) states is ambiguous, since the binary operation of summation in a Hilbert space does not pass down to the quotient projective space. Even though Dirac noted this as early as 1930, it is often asserted that the superposition is a binary operation acting on two states with a value that is a unique state. The goal for this note is to motivate a rigorous, geometrical definition of the superposition of states in the setting of complex projective space, which has been argued elsewhere to be the natural geometric phase space for quantum theory. The upshot is that the new definition of the superposition of two pure states, viewed as two distinct points in the projective space, is the unique (complex) line on which those two points lie. Finally, a comparison is given between superposition and expansion in an orthonormal basis.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

PermDoRA – Understanding Adapter Interference in Language Models: Limits of Parameter-Space Geometry

arXiv:2606.11262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Access control in large language models (LLMs) requires modular mechanisms to enable domain-specific behavior without retraining or cross-domain interference. A common hypothesis is that interference during adapter composition arises from overlap in linear parameter updates, suggesting that enforcing orthogonality or directional independence should improve multi-domain performance. We test this hypothesis using DoRA-RBAC, a hierarchical adapter composition framework based on weight-decomposed low-rank adaptation. We compare conventional Euclidean merging with a geometry-aware Riemannian-inspired merging strategy that approximates the Frechet mean via normalized directional averaging across multiple QA benchmarks (GPQA, PubMedQA, SimpleQA, WMDP) on LLaMA-3.1-8B and Mistral-7B. Our results show that while single-domain performance matches LoRA, geometry-aware merging provides no consistent advantage over standard averaging in multi-domain settings.Diagnostic analysis further reveals that angular alignment and orthogonality of adapter updates are weak predictors of composition performance. These findings suggest that adapter interference is not governed primarily by parameter-space geometry, but is instead consistent with interactions in shared nonlinear representations.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FAPO: Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization of Multi-Step LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.19605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain. We present FAPO (Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization), a framework that lets Claude Code optimize an LLM pipeline inside a standardized codebase. FAPO evaluates a pipeline, inspects intermediate steps, diagnoses failures, proposes scoped changes, and validates variants repeatedly to optimize against a score function. It first tries prompt edits and, only when prompt optimization appears insufficient, changes chain structure within the permitted scope when attribution identifies a structural bottleneck. Across six benchmarks and three task models, FAPO beats the baseline GEPA in 15 of 18 model-benchmark comparisons. In 11 model-benchmark comparisons, FAPO wins with non-overlapping mean $\pm$ trial-standard-deviation ranges, and the mean FAPO-GEPA gain is +14.1 pp. In the six HoVer and IFBench comparisons where prompt-first search escalated to structural changes, FAPO wins all six with a mean gain of +33.8 pp. FAPO also improves performance on security tasks: on CTIBench-RCM, a security CVE-to-CWE task, prompt-only FAPO lifts test accuracy by +4.0 pp on GPT-5, +7.1 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct, and +2.0 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning. These results position FAPO as a state-of-the-art pipeline optimization technique for both general-purpose and security-focused tasks.