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 (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Resources and Wigner Symmetry in Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering from Effective Field Theory

arXiv:2606.17148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study quantum resources in the spin degrees of freedom, such as entanglement, stabilizer magic, and non-local magic, in low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering through next-to-leading order in pionless effective field theory. Treating each nucleon spin as a qubit, we calculate the corresponding resource-generating powers of the scattering operator at generic center-of-mass momentum and scattering angle $\Theta$. The analysis retains $S$- and $P$-wave channels generated by two-derivative contact interactions. When the microscopic physics exhibits Wigner's $SU(4)$ spin-flavor symmetry, the neutron-proton amplitude becomes proportional to the spin-space identity operator and therefore generates no new resources after scattering, extending an observation previously made for leading-order $S$-wave scattering. The same-nucleon channel remains resource-generating because constraints from identical particles project out part of the Hilbert space. These results show how enhanced symmetries, partial-wave structure, and resource generation are intertwined in low-energy two-body scattering.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

FinTradeBench: A Financial Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs

Real-world financial decision-making is a challenging problem that requires reasoning over heterogeneous signals, including company fundamentals derived from regulatory filings and trading signals computed from price dynamics. Recently, with advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), financial analysts have begun to use them for financial decision-making tasks. However, existing financial question-answering benchmarks for testing these models primarily focus on company balance sheet data and rarely evaluate reasoning about how company stocks trade in the market or their interactions with fundamentals. To leverage the strengths of both approaches, we introduce FinTradeBench, a benchmark for evaluating financial reasoning that integrates company fundamentals and trading signals. FinTradeBench contains 1,400 questions grounded in NASDAQ-100 companies over a ten-year historical window. The benchmark is organized into three reasoning categories: fundamentals-focused, trading-signal-focused, and hybrid questions requiring cross-signal reasoning. To ensure reliability at scale, we adopt a calibration-then-scaling framework that combines expert seed questions, multi-model response generation, intra-model self-filtering, numerical auditing, and human-LLM judge alignment. We evaluate 14 LLMs under zero-shot prompting and retrieval-augmented settings and witness a clear performance gap. Retrieval substantially improves reasoning over textual fundamentals, but provides limited benefit for trading-signal reasoning. These findings highlight fundamental challenges in the numerical and time-series reasoning for current LLMs and motivate future research in financial intelligence.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Truncated Wigner dynamics of biclique quantum spin glasses

作者:

arXiv:2606.20187v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum spin glasses are often considered testbeds for studying quantum optimization algorithms and as such have been the subject of various quantum advantage claims. Here we investigate the near adiabatic dynamics of biclique quantum spin glasses within the (discrete) truncated Wigner approximation (TWA). Benchmarks on small systems show that TWA recovers sample-to-sample fluctuations of the Edwards-Anderson order parameter, over a wide range of annealing times, with increasing fidelity when the system size increases. We extract critical exponents from the Binder cumulant in line with theoretical expectations, reproducing recent quantum experiments. The computational cost of the method is minimal and it can easily be applied to tens of thousands of qubits.

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

From Self-Supervised Speech Models to Mixture-of-Experts for Robust Anti-Spoofing

arXiv:2606.14639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in speech generation have significantly improved the naturalness of synthetic speech, making spoofing detection increasingly challenging. A key limitation of current anti-spoofing systems is their limited robustness to unseen synthesis methods. In this work, we transform a self-supervised speech representation model into a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to improve generalization. Feed-forward blocks in selected encoder layers are replaced by multiple expert networks controlled by a layer-wise gating mechanism, allowing experts to capture complementary acoustic patterns while preserving the representations learned during self-supervised pretraining. We further analyze the architectural choices affecting the performance of this MoE conversion and investigate the activation behavior of the experts. The proposed approach is evaluated on 14 spoofing datasets and reduces the macro EER from 5.46% to 4.81%, corresponding to 11.9% relative improvement over the baseline.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Cortical development dynamics across autism spectrum disorder mouse models

Despite the functional diversity of over 100 causal genes1–3, phenotypic convergence across models may reveal common neurobiological processes in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here we profiled 251 samples from 11 monogenic mouse models of ASD using single-nucleus multi-omic sequencing across three developmental stages, both sexes and two brain regions. Despite genetic heterogeneity, ASD-linked mutations converged on perturbations of the radial glial cell lineage. These alterations reflect a transient developmental delay rather than lasting lineage misspecification and resolve by postnatal stages. Molecularly, the largest transcriptional differences emerged in neurons at early postnatal stages. These changes included downregulation of synaptic and ion channel-related genes, consistent with homeostatic adaptation or delayed maturation. Network analysis showed molecular convergence across models within each developmental stage, suggesting that diverse mutations linked to ASD impinge on common, stage-specific processes. Convergence becomes less pronounced by postnatal day 14, highlighting the dynamic nature of ASD-associated changes. Cross-genotype heterogeneity is superimposed on stage-specific effects. Electrophysiology corroborated this pattern: mutants generally showed altered neuronal excitability and synaptic properties with model-specific nuances. Our study also highlighted sex-specific gene expression alterations, with female mice often displaying larger effect sizes than male mice. Together, our findings provide a comprehensive view of developmental cellular and molecular dynamics across models of ASD. Using single-nucleus multi-omic sequencing, diverse autism spectrum disorder-linked gene mutations converge on transient, stage-specific disruptions in early brain development, and highlight sex-specific gene expression alterations.

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

A Taxonomy of Mental Health and Technology Needs for Alzheimer's and Dementia Caregivers

arXiv:2606.19247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Family members caring for individuals with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) provide the foundation of long-term care worldwide. In 2023, more than 11 million U.S. family and friends contributed 18 billion hours of unpaid care, often at the cost of their own physical and mental health. These informal caregivers – also referred as the "invisible second patients" – experience elevated rates of mental health problems. Yet research commonly reduces their complex psychosocial experiences to a single construct of caregiver burden, obscuring which specific needs are unmet or effectively supported. At the same time, digital and AI-enabled technologies are rapidly expanding, from smartphone apps and videoconferencing to sensor platforms and AI chatbots. However, the absence of shared frameworks across medicine, psychology, and technology research limits cumulative progress. This study introduces a Caregiver Mental Health and Technology Taxonomy that systematically links AD/ADRD caregiver needs with corresponding classes of technology-based interventions. Drawing from an interdisciplinary literature review and two qualitative studies with caregivers, the taxonomy identifies mismatches between caregiver priorities and existing technological support, highlights under-served domains such as relational strain and compassion fatigue, and proposes design directions for adaptive, responsive systems. The framework offers a shared vocabulary to guide clinicians, researchers, and technology designers in developing more person-centered and clinically grounded innovation in dementia care.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Echo2ECG: Enhancing ECG Representations with Cardiac Morphology from Multi-View Echos

arXiv:2603.08505v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is a low-cost, widely used modality for diagnosing electrical abnormalities like atrial fibrillation by capturing the heart's electrical activity. However, it cannot directly measure cardiac morphological phenotypes, such as left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), which typically require echocardiography (Echo). Predicting these phenotypes from ECG would enable early, accessible health screening. Existing self-supervised methods suffer from a representational mismatch by aligning ECGs to single-view Echos, which only capture local, spatially restricted anatomical snapshots. To address this, we propose Echo2ECG, a multimodal self-supervised learning framework that enriches ECG representations with the heart's morphological structure captured in multi-view Echos. We evaluate Echo2ECG as an ECG feature extractor on two clinically relevant tasks that fundamentally require morphological information: (1) classification of structural cardiac phenotypes across three datasets, and (2) retrieval of Echo studies with similar morphological characteristics using ECG queries. Our extracted ECG representations consistently outperform those of state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal baselines across both tasks, despite being 18x smaller than the largest baseline. These results demonstrate that Echo2ECG is a robust, powerful ECG feature extractor. Our code is accessible at https://github.com/michelleespranita/Echo2ECG.

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

Zero-Shot Cross-City Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Self-Supervised versus Supervised Representations

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on multi-city datasets using supervised ImageNet-pretrained backbones, yet their ability to generalize to unseen cities remains largely unexamined. When training and evaluation data are geographically mixed, models may implicitly rely on city-specific cues, masking failure modes that would occur under real-world domain shifts when generalizing to new locations. In this work, we formulate zero-shot cross-city transfer as a controlled representation-level stress test for end-to-end autonomous driving and ask how visual pretraining affects transfer behavior under geographic domain shift. We conduct a comprehensive study by integrating self-supervised backbones I-JEPA, DINOv2, and MAE into planning frameworks. We evaluate performance under strict geographic splits on nuScenes in the open-loop setting and on NAVSIM in the closed-loop evaluation protocol. Our experiments reveal a substantial generalization gap when transferring models across cities with different road topologies, traffic conventions, and visual environments. In open-loop evaluation, a supervised backbone exhibits severe degradation when transferring between cities, yet some domain-specific self-supervised methods can substantially reduce both displacement and collision degradation. In closed-loop evaluation, self-supervised pretraining improves average out-of-distribution PDMS in several single-city training settings. Our results provide empirical evidence that representation learning influences the robustness of cross-city planning and motivate zero-shot geographic transfer as an important stress test for evaluating end-to-end autonomous driving systems.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Speed Limit in a Far-from-Equilibrium Bose Gas: Symmetry and Dynamical Decoherence

arXiv:2605.11895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting universal transport coefficients in far-from-equilibrium quantum systems remains a fundamental challenge. A paradigmatic example is the non-thermal fixed point (NTFP) of isolated Bose gases, where coherence spreads as $\ell^2(t) = C\hbar t/m$ with a universal constant $C$. While the scaling exponent $z=2$ is well established, the amplitude $C$ has remained elusive because the underlying particle cascade $n(k)\sim k^{-4}$ leads to a divergent kinetic energy, threatening the very existence of a constant speed limit. Here we resolve this paradox and present the first analytical, parameter-free prediction of a universal amplitude $C$. A deep interplay between symmetry and dissipation is uncovered. The emergent weak U(1) symmetry at the NTFP enforces a conserved total current, forcing the low-energy phase dynamics to obey a diffusive Langevin equation with noise entering as the divergence of a stochastic current. This structure, combined with dynamical decoherence of high-momentum modes, yields a universal power-law momentum distribution $\tilde{f}(v)\sim(1+v^2)^{-3}$ (with $v=k\ell$) that naturally regularizes the ultraviolet divergence. From this, a parameter-free geometric baseline $C=3$ is obtained, independent of microscopic details. The experimental value $C=3.4(3)$ [Martirosyan et al., Nature 647, 608 (2025)] is then shown to be quantitatively consistent with universal logarithmic corrections arising from a marginally irrelevant coupling at the fixed point. A new paradigm is thus established for predicting transport coefficients in strongly correlated non-equilibrium systems: symmetry constraints determine the low-energy effective theory, dynamical decoherence provides a natural ultraviolet completion, and scaling analysis delivers testable predictions moving beyond scaling exponents to quantitative amplitude prediction.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Hy-Embodied-0.5-VLA: From Vision-Language-Action Models to a Real-World Robot Learning Stack

arXiv:2606.14409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this report, we present Hy-Embodied-0.5-VLA, abbreviated as HyVLA-0.5, an end-to-end system that spans the full robot learning stack: data collection, model design, continued pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, RL post-training, and real-world deployment. Each component serves a distinct role in this stack.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Better data, better trees: GenBank-GISAID deduplication and source-specific artifact masking in viral genomics

GenBank and GISAID are the primary repositories for viral genomic data, but integrating records across them remains a challenge. The same sequence could be made available in both databases without any cross-reference linking the two entries. Consequently, there is no systematic way to identify this redundancy, which compromises the compilation of representative, non-redundant large-scale datasets. In parallel, the growth of viral genomic data has increased the risk of systematic technical artifacts introduced during sequencing or assembly. These artifacts can inflate substitution rate estimates and degrade temporal signal, biasing evolutionary rate estimates. To address both challenges, here we present a formal, reproducible workflow integrating two newly developed complementary tools: G2G matcher for cross-repository harmonization and Lab-Specific Bias FILTer (LSBFILT) for masking of laboratory-specific artifacts. Using the Eastern/Central/South African (ECSA) chikungunya virus lineage as a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate that our integrated workflow restores temporal signal and provides a robust, curated dataset for downstream phylodynamic analyses. Critically, restricting masking of homoplastic sites to specific sequences reduces the substitution rate estimate from an inflated 8.517 x 10e-4; to 5.078 x 10e-4; substitutions/site/year and increases the coefficient of determination (R2) of the root-to-tip regression analysis from 0.353 to 0.677. By enabling systematic cross-repository harmonization and source-specific artifact masking, we provide the molecular epidemiological community with scalable tools to reconcile fragmented genomic data and reduce technical biases, fostering more accurate and reproducible phylogenetic analysis. G2G matcher is available at https://github.com/andrezaleite/G2G-Matcher, and LSBFILT at https://github.com/khourious/LSBFILT.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DySink: Dynamic Frame Sinks for Autoregressive Long Video Generation

Autoregressive long video generation often adopts bounded-memory streaming for efficiency, typically combining local windows for short-term continuity with static early-frame sinks as long-range anchors. However, this fixed allocation keeps early frames cached even when the current visual state has substantially diverged from them, while discarding potentially more relevant intermediate history. As a result, the retained long-range context may become less adaptive and bias generation toward outdated cues; in severe cases, RoPE-induced phase re-alignment can homogenize inter-head attention and cause sink collapse, where content regresses toward sink frames. We propose DySink, a retrieval-based framework that maintains a compact memory bank and selects visually relevant historical frames as dynamic frame sinks. DySink couples adaptive retrieval with a sink anomaly gate, which detects excessive inter-head consensus over retrieved context and suppresses collapse-prone context. Experiments on minute-long videos show that DySink consistently improves dynamic degree over strong baselines while also achieving higher temporal quality. The code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/yebo0216best/DySink.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Critical Look at Targeted Instruction Selection: Disentangling What Matters (and What Doesn't)

arXiv:2602.14696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task. Despite growing interest, the literature on targeted instruction selection remains fragmented and opaque: methods vary widely in selection budgets, often omit zero-shot baselines, and frequently entangle the contributions of key components. As a result, practitioners lack actionable guidance on selecting instructions for their target tasks. In this work, we aim to bring clarity to this landscape by disentangling and systematically analyzing the two core ingredients: data representation and selection algorithms. Our framework enables controlled comparisons across models, tasks, and budgets. We find that only gradient-based data representations choose subsets whose similarity to the query consistently predicts performance across datasets, models, and candidate pools. While no single method dominates, gradient-based representations paired with greedy round-robin selection often perform best on average at low budgets, but these gains diminish at larger budgets. Finally, we unify several existing selection algorithms as forms of approximate distance minimization between the selected subset and the query set, and support this view with new generalization bounds. More broadly, our findings provide critical insights and a foundation for more principled data selection in LLM fine-tuning. The code is available at https://github.com/dcml-lab/targeted-instruction-selection.

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

CLoVE: Personalized Federated Learning through Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings

arXiv:2506.22427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose CLoVE (Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings), a novel algorithm for Clustered Federated Learning (CFL). In CFL, clients are naturally grouped into clusters based on their data distribution. However, identifying these clusters is challenging, as client assignments are unknown. CLoVE utilizes client embeddings derived from model losses on client data, and leverages the insight that clients in the same cluster share similar loss values, while those in different clusters exhibit distinct loss patterns. Based on these embeddings, CLoVE is able to iteratively identify and separate clients from different clusters and optimize cluster-specific models through federated aggregation. Key advantages of CLoVE over existing CFL algorithms are (1) its simplicity, (2) its applicability to both supervised and unsupervised settings, and (3) the fact that it eliminates the need for near-optimal model initialization, which makes it more robust and better suited for real-world applications. We establish theoretical convergence bounds, showing that CLoVE can recover clusters accurately with high probability in a single round and converges exponentially fast to optimal models in a linear setting. Our comprehensive experiments comparing with a variety of both CFL and generic Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) algorithms on different types of datasets and an extensive array of non-IID settings demonstrate that CLoVE achieves highly accurate cluster recovery in just a few rounds of training, along with state-of-the-art model accuracy, across a variety of both supervised and unsupervised PFL tasks.

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

Mitigating Simplicity Bias in OOD Detection through Object Co-occurrence Analysis

arXiv:2605.07821v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring the reliability of deep learning models. Existing methods mostly focus on regular entangled representations to discriminate in-distribution (ID) and OOD data, neglecting the rich contextual information within images. This issue is particularly challenging for detecting near-OOD, as models with simplicity bias struggle to learn discriminative features in disentangled representations. The human visual system can use the co-occurrence of objects in the natural environment to facilitate scene understanding. Inspired by this, we propose an Object-Centric OOD detection framework that learns to capture Object CO-occurrence (OCO) patterns within images. The proposed method introduces a new OOD detection paradigm that understands object co-occurrence within an image by predicting disentangled representations for the test sample, then adaptively divides patterns into three scenarios based on object co-occurrence patterns observed in ID training data, and finally performs OOD detection in a divide-and-conquer manner. By doing so, OCO can distinguish near-OOD by considering the semantic contextual relationships present in their images, avoiding the tendency to focus solely on simple, easily learnable regions. We evaluate OCO through experiments across challenging and full-spectrum OOD settings, demonstrating competitive results and confirming its ability to address both semantic and covariate shifts. Code is released at https://github.com/Michael-McQueen/OCO.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

AdsMind: A Physics-Grounded Multi-Agent System for Self-Correcting Discovery of Adsorption Configurations on Heterogeneous Catalyst Surfaces

arXiv:2606.19152v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying the lowest-energy surface-adsorbate configuration is critical for modeling heterogeneous catalysis, yet exhaustive exploration with ab initio calculations is computationally prohibitive. Machine-learning force fields (MLFFs) accelerate structural relaxation but leave the search over the vast configurational space a major bottleneck, and open-loop large language model (LLM) agents lack a physics-grounded feedback mechanism to correct erroneous initial guesses. We propose AdsMind (Adsorption configuration discovery with Machine intelligence and relaxation feedback), a closed-loop multi-agent framework that enables autonomous error correction through MLFF relaxation feedback. Across four LLM backends, AdsMind achieves consistently high search reliability, with success rates of 100% and 98.8% on the benchmarks AA20 and OCD-GMAE62. Relative to its single-pass (1-Shot) ablation it reduces cross-backend energy dispersion, and it uses only 4.11 and 4.67 MLFF relaxations per case, respectively – an approximately 14-fold reduction over heuristic enumeration baselines. Density functional theory (DFT) validation using VASP/PBE on six representative AA20 systems shows that the reported open-loop Adsorb-Agent outputs exhibit qualitative adsorption-energy sign errors for molecular adsorbates, whereas AdsMind preserves the correct sign in all tested cases with closer quantitative agreement. AdsMind thus delivers reliability, self-reflection, and interpretability simultaneously, supporting more DFT-informed autonomous chemistry workflows.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Factor Analysing Predictive Processing: No Evidence for a General Factor Across Tasks

Background & Hypothesis: Dysfunctional predictive processing (PP), specifically the aberrant weighting of priors, is a frequently-proposed mechanism for psychosis and psychosis-like phenomena (schizotypy). Evidence for this theory mostly originates from single-task studies, which assume that all tasks load onto a single latent construct of PP performance, but the underlying factor structure of PP tasks is unknown. PP deficits in psychosis may be better described by a two-factor, hierarchical model: weakened lower-level (perceptual) priors compensated by higher-level (cognitive) priors. Study Design: This study implements a multi-paradigm approach in healthy participants to investigate latent constructs underlying PP and their relationship to schizotypy. Participants (N = 73) completed 6 tasks measuring reliance on priors across language, memory, visual, and auditory domains. A factor analysis investigated whether performance across tasks is captured by a single or two-factor model. Study Results: Although a two-factor model best described performance, factors reflected within-task correlations rather than a PP hierarchy. Cross-task PP measures were poorly correlated, suggesting that individuals' weighting of priors was task-specific. A full model including all task outcomes (not factors) significantly predicted the severity of schizotypal aberrant beliefs but no other schizotypal measures. Conclusions: These results do not evidence a single factor underpinning PP performance. It is therefore inappropriate to use results from single tasks to propose a generalised PP deficit in psychosis. Variation was also not captured by a two-factor hierarchical model of priors. Further multi-paradigm research is required to evaluate alternative models or additional variables that describe aberrant PP in psychosis.

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

DeFAb: A Verifiable Benchmark for Defeasible Abduction in Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.18557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A rule-based logic solver resolves every instance in our benchmark in under 50 microseconds with 100% accuracy; the best frontier language model reaches 65% at best and drops to 23.5% under rendering-robust evaluation (worst case over four surface renderings). We introduce DeFAb (Defeasible Abduction Benchmark), a dataset and generation pipeline that converts four decades of publicly funded knowledge bases into formally grounded instances for defeasible abduction: constructing hypotheses that explain anomalies by overriding defaults while preserving unrelated expectations. Because every hypothesis must pass polynomial-time checks for valid derivation, conservativity, and minimality, DeFAb makes logical rigor the instrument for measuring creativity and theoretical reasoning, scoring the disciplined construction of theory revisions rather than fluent but theory-destroying prose. The pipeline pairs taxonomic hierarchies (OpenCyc, YAGO, Wikidata) with behavioral property graphs (ConceptNet, UMLS) to produce 372,648+ instances across 33.75M materialized rules from 18 sources, in three levels with polynomial-time verifiable gold standards. Four frontier models do not reliably internalize defeasible reasoning: rendering-robust Level 2 accuracy is 7.8-23.5%; chain-of-thought variance (~36 pp) exceeds any inter-model gap; and a matched contamination control isolates a +19.4 pp Level 3 gap. We further release DeFAb-Hard (a 235-instance Level 3 difficulty variant; best model 53.3% vs 100% symbolic) and CONJURE (a kernel-verified transformative-creativity variant of 560 Lean 4/Mathlib instances whose gold answers are definitions the proof kernel did not previously contain, judge-free verifier; a pilot finds zero novel concepts). The same verifier doubles as an exact reward for preference optimization (DPO, RLVR/GRPO). Released under MIT at https://huggingface.co/datasets/PatrickAllenCooper/DeFAb.

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

From Isolation to Entanglement: When Do Interpretability Methods Identify and Disentangle Known Concepts?

A goal of interpretability is to recover disentangled representations of latent concepts (features) from the activations of neural networks. The quality of features is typically evaluated in isolation, and under implicit independence assumptions that may not hold in practice. Thus, it is unclear to what extent common featurization methods such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and probes disentangle one concept from another. We propose a multi-concept evaluation setting using concepts including sentiment, domain, voice, and tense. We evaluate how well featurizers produce disentangled representations of each concept, observing that features are typically sensitive to only one concept, but also that concepts are distributed across many features. Then, we steer these features, measuring whether each concept is independently manipulable, and whether features interact. Even in idealized settings, steering a feature often affects many concepts, despite a near absence of interaction effects. These results suggest that correlational metrics are insufficient to establish steering selectivity, and that demonstrating that two features operate in separate spaces is insufficient to claim that they will be selective for one concept. These results underscore the importance of multi-concept evaluations in interpretability research.

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

Harnessing cortical geometry, wiring, and function as inductive biases for recurrent neural networks

arXiv:2606.14975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How the wiring and functional organization of cortex shape recurrent computation remains a central question in both neuroscience and machine learning. Here, we leverage data released through the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program–a functional connectomics resource spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex, in which dense calcium imaging is co-registered with high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction from the same animal–to build biologically grounded recurrent neural networks. Using neuronal spatial coordinates, anatomical connectivity, and function-derived relationships from nearly 12,000 coregistered excitatory neurons, we initialize recurrent weights and impose communication-aware spatial constraints during learning. Across three cognitive decision-making tasks, networks constrained by cortical structure and function consistently outperform baseline and partially constrained models. Functional weight initialization provides the largest gain, while real spatial embedding yields robust additional improvements across conditions. These biologically grounded networks also develop low-entropy, modular, and small-world organization, and retain strong performance even when recurrence is restricted to positive weights. Together, our results show that the machinery of cortex–its geometry, wiring, and functional structure–can be harnessed as a powerful inductive basis for building recurrent networks that learn more effectively while converging toward key organizational principles of biological computation.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FlowFake: Liquid Networks for Audio Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2606.19579v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio deepfakes generated by neural text-to-speech and voice-cloning systems threaten speaker verification and public discourse at scale. The core challenge is cross-dataset generalization: detectors trained on one synthesis pipeline collapse on unseen forgeries. We argue that this failure is primarily because of structural synthetic speech artifacts which are multi-timescale trajectory anomalies. Though every existing detector aggregates a fixed-window frame statistics, this misaligns the architecture with the signal. We propose FlowFake, a Liquid Time-Constant (LTC) architecture whose hidden state evolves via a learned ODE, with per-neuron adaptive time constants simultaneously resolving spectral (10ms) and prosodic (2s) cues. At only 34K parameters FlowFake achieves formal BIBO stability and O(dt^4) integration error. On a four-dataset cross domain benchmark (ASVspoof2019-LA, FakeOrReal, InTheWild, MLAAD), FlowFake reaches 75.29% on ASVspoof2019 trained only on FakeOrReal and 79.97% trained only on MLAAD. It outperforms RawGAT-ST and Whisper-DF on every evaluated pair and matching SSL Wav2vec2 (300x larger) at 0.01% of its parameter count. The source code is available on : https://github.com/GhostRider2023/FlowFake

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

When to Trust, How to Distill: Multi-Foundation Model Guidance for Lightweight, Robust Scientific Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) in physical sciences is hindered by a critical trade-off: while these models encode rich, universal temporal dynamics, they suffer from severe distributional misalignment when applied zero-shot to specific scientific domains, and their computational cost prohibits deployment in edge-computing sensor networks. We address a fundamental challenge: How can we extract latent structural knowledge from misaligned foundation models (FM) to train lightweight, specialized forecasters? We propose Gated Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Distillation (Guard), a novel framework that reframes multiteacher distillation as an instance-wise decision process with two adaptive mechanisms: (1) a Contextual Router that dynamically selects the most relevant teacher based on local input statistics, exploiting complementarity across diverse foundation models; and (2) an Uncertainty-Gated Temperature mechanism that acts as a "circuit-breaker," automatically attenuating distillation strength when teacher confidence diverges from domain reality. We evaluate our proposed lightweight framework on four climate-critical domains: meteorology, ecosystem carbon flux, soil moisture, and energy grids. Our method significantly reduces RMSE relative to a fixed-weight multi-teacher distillation baseline, successfully distilling knowledge from pretrained FMs (teachers) even when they exhibit suboptimal zero-shot accuracy due to distribution shift between the original and target data domains. We demonstrate that these domain-misaligned teachers can still serve as critical correctives, outperforming the globally superior FMs on 28.5% of the hardest instances. Ultimately, this enables high-precision scientific forecasting suitable for resource-constrained edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/RupasreeDey/GUARD-KDD2026.

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

Calibration Without Comprehension: Diagnosing the Limits of Fine-Tuning LLMs for Vulnerability Detection in Systems Software

arXiv:2606.20502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whether LLMs scoring well on vulnerability benchmarks genuinely reason about security or merely pattern-match on contaminated data remains unresolved. We present CWE-Trace, a framework for LLM vulnerability detection built from 834 manually curated Linux kernel samples spanning 74 CWEs. The framework enforces a strict temporal split (pre-2025 historical set / post-cutoff leakage-free set), preserves context-aware vulnerable–patched pairs, and introduces two diagnostic metrics: the Directional Failure Index (DFI) and Hierarchical Distance and Direction (HDD). We evaluate eight vanilla LLMs and 15 LoRA fine-tuned variants across non-targeted detection, targeted detection, and CWE classification. Our analysis yields two key results. First, data contamination provides no measurable advantage. Function-level analysis shows that 84% of nominally contaminated samples carry no usable memorization signal: vulnerable functions are absent or cross-mapped across datasets, and ~31% of contaminated samples carry CWE misclassification. Second, backbone directional priors dominate fine-tuning. Models exhibit stable, systematic failure modes (DFI ranging from -85.5 to +94.8 pp) that persist from historical to post-cutoff data and resist correction. Fine-tuning shifts the output threshold without changing the decision policy. This is calibration without comprehension: output distributions adapt to training data while the underlying security reasoning remains absent. The weakest backbone at binary detection (DeepSeek-R1) gains the most in coarse CWE classification, revealing that detection and understanding are decoupled capabilities. The best detection score reaches only 52.1% (+2.1 pp above chance); exact CWE ranking remains below 1.3% Top-1 accuracy, confirming that current LLMs lack reliable security reasoning for systems software, regardless of fine-tuning strategy.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

UltraSketchLLM: Sub-1-Bit LLM Compression via Sketch and Hardware-Friendly Operators

arXiv:2506.17255v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) require larger GPU memory size these days, necessitating efficient and extreme weight compression methods. Existing compression methods are either theoretically limited by 1 bit per weight or face severe performance degradation and inefficiency. To deploy LLMs in resource-constrained scenarios, we introduce UltraSketchLLM, compressing LLMs with data sketch. It reduces peak GPU memory footprint with a high compression rate down to 0.5 bit per weight. Combined with hardware-friendly implementation, UltraSketchLLM keeps tolerable performance degradation and extremely low latency overhead with 14.9x speedup compared to naive sketch solution.