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.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS

Interstellar objects provide the only directly observable samples of icy planetesimals formed around other stars, and can therefore provide insight into the diversity of physical and chemical conditions occurring during exoplanet formation1−3. Here we report isotopic measurements of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which reveal an elemental composition unlike any Solar System body. The water in 3I/ATLAS is enriched in deuterium, at a level of D/H = (0.98 ± 0.06)%, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than in known comets, while its range of 12C/13C ratios (141–191 for CO2 and 123–172 for CO) exceeds typical values found in the Solar System, as well as nearby interstellar clouds and protoplanetary disks. Such extreme isotopic signatures indicate formation at temperatures  ≲ 30 K in a relatively metal-poor environment. When interpreted with respect to models for Galactic chemical evolution, the carbon isotopic composition implies that 3I/ATLAS may have accreted as long ago as 12 billion years, following a period of intense, early star formation. 3I/ATLAS thus represents a preserved fragment of an ancient planetary system.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model for Standard View Classification of Echocardiographic Videos

Automated classification of standard echocardiographic views is crucial for efficient clinical workflow but faces three main challenges. First, publicly available datasets are scarce and limited in scale and view coverage. Second, the performance of some modern video-level architectures for echocardiographic view classification remains underexplored. Third, some view categories exhibit highly similar spatial appearances, making single-frame features insufficient for discrimination, while heterogeneous frame quality complicates robust temporal information fusion. To address these challenges, we release the Echocardiographic Videos of Nine Views (EV9V) dataset, comprising 5,138 videos, 910,579 frames, and 9 standard views, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest publicly available echocardiography video dataset. Using EV9V, we systematically benchmark representative video classification architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformers. Furthermore, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model (STFM), an efficient dual-stream CNN-LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) framework that jointly captures spatial anatomical structures and temporal cardiac dynamics. The proposed framework leverages uncertainty-aware learning to preferentially sample representative video segments during training and evidence-based fusion during inference, improving robustness to variations in frame quality across echocardiographic videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance across diverse video classification models, validating the effectiveness of uncertainty-aware spatio-temporal learning for echocardiographic view classification. The code is available at https://github.com/bgx666/stfm.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

SPARQ-MI leverages end-to-end spatial single-cell analysis of the tumor microenvironment

Detailed spatial analysis of the tumor micro-environment (TME) through multiplexed fluorescence imaging requires quantitative image-processing and data-analysis methods. While data-preprocessing down to segmentation of individual cells is captured by available methods, statistical analysis of single-cell features is compromised by the uneven noise distribution especially in complex tissues such as the TME, as well as by labor-intensive manual cell-type annotation and region segmentation. Here, we present SPARQ-MI (Spatial Phenotyping, Architecture Reconstruction and Quantification from Multiplexed Imaging) for streamlined spatial single-cell analysis, along with a tissue microarray PhenoCycler data-set with 37 fluorescent channels from melanoma patients under immunotherapy. We demonstrate that SPARQ-MI enables robust reconstruction of the cellular and spatial composition in this and other tissue types. Our analysis reveals associations of the cell-state and spatial location of CD8 T cells with response to immunotherapy. Overall, SPARQ-MI allows for quantitative analysis of complex fluorescence histology samples under minimal user input, and accounting for spatially uneven coverage of antibody signals, setting the stage for quantitative analysis of clinical samples.

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

PURe: A Plug-and-Play Product-Unit Residual Module for Vision Networks

Modern vision networks are dominated by additive local transformations, whereas explicit multiplicative local interactions remain underexplored. Product units offer a direct approach to modeling such interactions, but their use in deep architectures has been limited by optimization instability. In this work, we propose PURe, a Product-Unit Residual Module for deep vision networks. PURe is built around a 2D Product Unit with a real-valued log-domain formulation that makes multiplicative local aggregation practical within deep residual hierarchies. The resulting module serves as a drop-in replacement for native residual units. We instantiate PURe in residual CNNs for image classification and in 2D residual encoder-decoder networks for slice-based segmentation on volumetric CT data. Across Galaxy10 DECaLS, ImageNet, and CIFAR-10, PURe consistently improves residual CNNs and yields a more favorable accuracy-parameter trade-off, allowing moderately deep models to match or surpass substantially deeper ResNet baselines with much smaller parameter budgets. On the AMOS benchmark, PURe also improves slice-based CT segmentation under 3D case-level evaluation. These results show that explicit multiplicative local interaction is a practical and effective design primitive for deep residual vision networks.

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

X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMs

While the shift from cascaded dialogue systems to end-to-end (E2E) speech Large Language Models (LLMs) improves latency and paralinguistic modeling, E2E models often exhibit a significant performance degradation compared to their text-based counterparts. The standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) training methods fail to close this gap. To address this, we propose X-OPD, a novel Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation framework designed to systematically align the capabilities of Speech LLMs to their text-based counterparts. X-OPD enables the Speech LLM to explore its own distribution via on-policy rollouts, where a text-based teacher model evaluates these trajectories and provides token-level feedback, effectively distilling teacher's capabilities into student's multi-modal representations. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that X-OPD significantly narrows the gap in complex tasks while preserving the model's inherent capabilities.

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

All Smoke, No Alarm: Oracle Signals in Agent-Authored Test Code

arXiv:2606.18168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software practitioners increasingly use AI coding agents that generate test code alongside production code in open source pull requests (PRs). Recent studies report more than 932,000 agent-authored PRs across more than 116,000 repositories, yet whether their test files contain meaningful verification logic remains underexplored. Test files lacking explicit assertions execute code without verifying behavior, so quality gates based on test-file presence overestimate verification strength. The goal of this paper is to help practitioners assess the verification strength of agent-authored patches by characterizing oracle signals and their link to merge outcomes and review effort. We conduct an empirical study of 86,156 test-file patches from 33,596 agent-authored PRs across 2,807 GitHub repositories produced by five coding agents: OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Devin, Cursor, and Claude Code. A qualitative analysis of 384 stratified patches informs a syntactic taxonomy of eight oracle signal categories. Applied at scale, 80.2% of test patches contain weak or no explicit oracle signals. While raw merge rates are lower for strong-oracle PRs, a regression analysis adjusting for agent, PR size, repository popularity, task type, and language shows strong oracles significantly improve merge likelihood (OR = 1.28, p < 0.001). Our findings suggest that test file counts substantially overestimate verification strength and that practitioners can adopt oracle-aware quality checks to more accurately evaluate agent-authored contributions.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

TetriServe: Efficiently Serving Mixed DiT Workloads

arXiv:2510.01565v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models excel at generating high-quality images through iterative denoising steps, but serving them under strict Service Level Objectives (SLOs) is challenging due to their high computational cost, particularly at larger resolutions. Existing serving systems use fixed-degree sequence parallelism, which is inefficient for heterogeneous workloads with mixed resolutions and deadlines, leading to poor GPU utilization and low SLO attainment. In this paper, we propose step-level sequence parallelism to dynamically adjust the degree of parallelism of individual requests according to their deadlines. We present TetriServe, a DiT serving system that implements this strategy for highly efficient image generation. Specifically, TetriServe introduces a novel round-based scheduling mechanism that improves SLO attainment by (1) discretizing time into fixed rounds to make deadline-aware scheduling tractable, (2) adapting parallelism at the step level and minimizing GPU hour consumption, and (3) jointly packing requests to minimize late completions. Extensive evaluation on state-of-the-art DiT models shows that TetriServe achieves up to 32% higher SLO attainment compared to existing solutions without degrading image quality.

08.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Long-term independent use of an intracortical brain–computer interface for speech and cursor control

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) can provide naturalistic communication and digital access to people with severe paralysis by decoding neural activity associated with attempted speech and movement. Recent work has demonstrated highly accurate intracortical BCIs for speech and cursor control, but two critical capabilities needed for practical viability were unmet: independent at-home operation without researcher assistance and reliable long-term performance supporting accurate speech and cursor decoding. Here we demonstrate the independent and near-daily use of a multimodal BCI with novel brain-to-text speech and computer cursor decoders by a man with paralysis and severe dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Over nearly 2 years, the participant used the BCI for more than 3,800 h at home with no researchers present to maintain rich interpersonal communication with his family and friends, independently control his personal computer and sustain full-time employment—despite being paralyzed. He communicated 183,060 sentences—totaling 1,960,163 words—at an average rate of 56 words per minute. He labeled 92% of sentences as being decoded at least mostly correctly. In formal quantifications of performance where he was asked to say words presented on a screen, attempted speech was consistently decoded with more than 99% word accuracy (125,000 word vocabulary). The participant also used the speech BCI as keyboard input and the cursor BCI as mouse input to control his personal computer, enabling him to send text messages and emails and to browse the internet. These results demonstrate that intracortical BCIs have the potential to support independent use in the home, marking a critical step toward practical assistive technology for people with severe motor impairment. An automated intracortical brain–computer interface, used at home with no researcher intervention, provides long-term and accurate restoration of speech-based communication and cursor-based computer usage in a person with severe dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

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

OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation

Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation. Yet helpfulness-driven post-training pulls them toward a homogeneous, overly agreeable assistant register, creating a behavioral Sim2Real gap. We present OdysSim, the largest open systematic investigation of behavioral foundation models, i.e., models trained to simulate human behavior at scale. We propose SOUL, a taxonomy of five capability axes (CONV, SS, COG, ROLE, EVAL) that unifies 62 datasets and 23 benchmark tasks under one framework. Specifically, we curate the OdysSim corpus (21.4M interactions, 10B tokens, retrofitted with back-generated social contexts), construct the SOUL-Index benchmark, and develop an end-to-end training recipe combining midtraining, task-specific RL, and expert distillation. The resulting open 8B OSim model ranks first or tied-first on 8 of 23 tasks, outperforming any individual frontier model by this count, with the strongest gains on conversational and social tasks. Its outputs are also more human-like in length, formatting, and word choice, and it transfers zero-shot to out-of-distribution user simulation on $\tau$-bench, nearly matching real users on reaction alignment (93.2 vs. 93.5). We further show that LLM-as-judge RL induces reward-hacking patterns, and that our detectors can mitigate them during post-training. Together, our findings suggest that behavioral foundation models require rethinking the LLM training paradigm. We release all artifacts to support future research.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Enhancing Decision-Making with Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Fictitious Play

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated great potential in solving tasks with execution complexity, by distributing subtasks across cooperative agents. However, this divide-and-conquer paradigm falls short on decision-making tasks that are also prevalent in the real world. These tasks require simultaneous reasoning from the stances of all involved stakeholders whose decisions are mutually dependent and thus cannot be solved in isolation. We characterize this challenge as stance entanglement, a form of decision complexity distinct from execution complexity. To address it, we propose Multi-Agent Fictitious Play (MAFP), a novel MAS paradigm that represents stakeholder stances as agents and formulates decision-making as an equilibrium-seeking process. Built on the game-theoretic principle of fictitious play, MAFP iteratively updates each agent's decision by best responding to the empirical mixture of other agents' past decisions. This enables agents to expose and address one another's weaknesses, progressively improving decision quality and robustness. We evaluate MAFP on challenging decision-making tasks that test the capability of deciding strategies for competitive scenarios prior to acting. MAFP outperforms both single-round and multi-round baselines on two complementary metrics, tournament strength and robustness, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing stance entanglement.

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

Regression Language Models for Code

We study code-to-metric regression: predicting numeric outcomes of code executions, a challenging task due to the open-ended nature of programming languages. While prior methods have resorted to heavy and domain-specific feature engineering, we show that a single unified Regression Language Model (RLM) using a frozen LLM encoder can simultaneously predict directly from text, (i) the memory footprint of code across multiple high-level languages such as Python and C++, (ii) the latency of Triton GPU kernels, and (iii) the accuracy and speed of trained neural networks represented in ONNX. In particular, a relatively small 300M parameter RLM based on T5Gemma, obtains >0.9 Spearman-rank on competitive programming submissions from APPS, and a single unified model achieves >0.5 average Spearman-rank across 24 different programming languages from CodeNet. Furthermore, the RLM can obtain the highest average Kendall-Tau of 0.46 on five classic NAS design spaces previously dominated by graph neural networks, and simultaneously predict architecture latencies on numerous hardware platforms.

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

Global Convergence of Gradient Descent for Score Matching in Gaussian Mixtures via Reverse Fisher Divergence

arXiv:2606.19876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The score matching problem is a central training objective in modern generative modeling, diffusion models, fitting unnormalized statistical models, and inverse problems. A standard approach is to minimize the forward Fisher divergence, where the expectation is taken with respect to the teacher distribution. However, recent results show that even in simple Gaussian mixture model settings, this objective can lead to undesirable and initialization-dependent convergence behavior. In this paper, we study an alternative objective: the reverse Fisher divergence, where the expectation is taken with respect to the student distribution. We analyze gradient descent (GD) for fitting Gaussian mixture models and show that this change in the objective leads to significantly better optimization properties. First, when the teacher distribution is a single Gaussian and the student is a Gaussian mixture model with fixed weights and identity covariances, we prove the global convergence of GD from arbitrary initializations. Second, we extend the analysis to the case where the teacher is also a Gaussian mixture model and prove global convergence guarantees under a global random initialization scheme and a $\widetilde{\Omega}(1)$-separation assumption on the target means. In particular, with high probability, each student component converges near its closest teacher component, and we provide conditions under which the student distribution converges in total variation distance. Our proofs rely on a new Lyapunov-based analysis of the gradient descent dynamics, showing that the reverse Fisher divergence has a much more favorable optimization landscape than the forward Fisher divergence.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

On the significance of Wigner's Friend in contexts beyond quantum foundations

arXiv:2402.08727v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: There has been a surge of recent interest in the Wigner's Friend paradox, sparking several novel thought experiments and no-go theorems. The main narrative has been that Wigner's Friend highlights a counterintuitive feature that is unique to quantum theory, and which is closely related to the quantum measurement problem. Here, we challenge this view. We argue that the gist of the Wigner's Friend paradox can be reproduced without assuming quantum physics, and that it underlies a much broader class of enigmas in the foundations of physics and philosophy. To show this, we first consider several recently proposed Extended Wigner's Friend scenarios, and demonstrate that some of their implications for the absoluteness of observations can be reproduced by classical thought experiments that involve the duplication of agents. Crucially, some of these classical scenarios are technologically much easier to implement than their quantum counterparts. Then, we argue that the essential structural ingredient of all these scenarios is a feature that we call "Restriction A": that a physical theory cannot give us a probabilistic description of the observations of all agents. Finally, we argue that this difficulty is at the core of other puzzles in the foundations of physics and philosophy, and demonstrate this explicitly for cosmology's Boltzmann brain problem. Our analysis suggests that Wigner's Friend should be studied in a larger context, addressing a frontier of human knowledge beyond quantum foundations: to obtain reliable predictions for experiments in which these predictions can be privately but not intersubjectively verified.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Sign-Rank, Index, and List Replicability: Connections and Separations

arXiv:2606.18236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In learning theory, the sign rank of a binary concept class captures the smallest dimension in which it can be represented by points and halfspaces. Despite tremendous interest, lower bounds on sign rank are notoriously difficult to come by. Two recent approaches to the problem establish lower bounds on sign rank by measures that are easier to analyze: the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index and the list replicability number. We order these measures, showing that the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index is upper-bounded by a linear function of the list replicability number. As a main consequence, we obtain a strong separation between sign rank and $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index, thereby resolving a question of Frick, Hosseini, and Vasileuski. This motivates a thorough study of list replicability, the stronger of the two lower-bounding measures. We establish upper bounds on the list replicability number by two combinatorial measures: height and minimum star number. We also prove a fundamental composition result, showing that the product of two concept classes has list replicability number bounded by the sum of the list replicability numbers of the two classes.

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

Dual Cross-Attention Siamese Transformer for Rectal Tumor Regrowth Assessment in Watch-and-Wait Endoscopy

Increasing evidence supports watch-and-wait (WW) surveillance for patients with rectal cancer who show clinical complete response (cCR) at restaging following total neoadjuvant treatment (TNT). However, accurate methods to early detect local regrowth (LR) from follow-up endoscopy images during WW are essential to manage care and prevent distant metastases. Hence, we developed a Siamese Swin Transformer with Dual Cross-Attention (SSDCA) to combine longitudinal endoscopic images at restaging and follow-up and distinguish cCR from LR. SSDCA leverages pretrained Swin Transformers to extract domain agnostic features and enhance robustness to imaging variations. Dual cross attention is implemented to emphasize features from the paired scans without requiring any spatial alignment to predict response. SSDCA as well as Swin-based baselines were trained using image pairs from 135 patients and evaluated on a held-out set of image pairs from 62 patients. SSDCA produced the best balanced accuracy (81.76% $\pm$ 0.04), sensitivity (90.07% $\pm$ 0.08), and specificity (72.86% $\pm$ 0.05). Robustness analysis showed stable performance irrespective of artifacts including blood, stool, telangiectasia, and poor image quality. UMAP clustering of extracted features showed maximal inter-cluster separation (1.45 $\pm$ 0.18) and minimal intra-cluster dispersion (1.07 $\pm$ 0.19) with SSDCA, confirming discriminative representation learning. Code and weights available at: https://github.com/Jotanator/SSDCA

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

Stochastic trace estimation with tensor train random vectors

arXiv:2606.15679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic trace estimation is a standard tool for approximating the trace of a large-scale matrix available only through matrix-vector products. However, in tensor-structured settings, unstructured Gaussian or Rademacher test vectors may be prohibitively expensive to store and compute with, while cheaper rank-one tensor-product vectors can require sample complexities that grow exponentially with the tensor order. This work studies Gaussian random tensor train vectors as a structured alternative for stochastic trace estimation. We show that, with a suitable choice of the tensor train rank, random tensor train vectors recover dimension-independent guarantees for the Girard–Hutchinson estimator. In particular, a median-of-means variant with tensor train rank $r \geq d-1$ achieves the same dependence on the accuracy $\varepsilon$ and failure probability $\delta$ as the classical estimator based on unstructured Gaussian vectors. We further prove an oblivious subspace injection result for sketches formed from independent Gaussian random tensor train vectors: tensor train rank $r\geq d-1$ and $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2}(k+\log(1/\delta)))$ samples suffice for a $k$-dimensional target subspace. Finally, we investigate the use of such sketches within the Nystr\"{o}m++ framework. We show that the resulting estimator can achieve the desired $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-1})$ sample complexity under an additional spectral-tail condition. These results provide clarififcation on both the potential and the limitations of random tensor train vectors in stochastic trace estimation.

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

LLMs as ASP Programmers: Self-Correction Enables Task-Agnostic Nonmonotonic Reasoning

arXiv:2604.27960v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive reasoning milestones but continue to struggle with high computational costs, logical inconsistencies, and sharp performance degradation on high-complexity problems. While neuro-symbolic methods attempt to mitigate these issues by coupling LLMs with symbolic reasoners, existing approaches typically rely on monotonic logics (e.g., SMT) that cannot represent defeasible reasoning – essential components of human cognition. We present "LLM+ASP," a framework that translates natural language into Answer Set Programming (ASP), a nonmonotonic formalism based on stable model semantics. Unlike prior "LLM+ASP" approaches that require manually authored knowledge modules, domain-specific prompts, or evaluation restricted to single problem classes, our framework operates without any per-task engineering and applies uniformly across diverse reasoning tasks. Our system utilizes an automated self-correction loop where structured feedback from the ASP solver enables iterative refinement. Evaluating across six diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that: (1) stable model semantics allow LLMs to naturally express default rules and exceptions, outperforming SMT-based alternatives by significant margins on nonmonotonic tasks; (2) iterative self-correction is the primary driver of performance, effectively replacing the need for handcrafted domain knowledge; (3) compact in-context reference guides substantially outperform verbose documentation, revealing a "context rot" phenomenon where excessive context hinders constraint adherence.

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

Towards Multi-Agent-Simulation-Based Community Note Evaluation

arXiv:2606.18268v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Community-based fact-checking that relies on cross-consensus is expanding rapidly on social media platforms. However, the delay and low-ratio of cross-consensus community fact-checks rated by human contributors remains a significant challenge. To address this, we first created ComRate, a large-scale dataset comprising 2.5 million community notes and over 209 million ratings sourced from $\mathbb{X}$. We then propose MultiCom, a persona-guided multi-agent rating framework for community note evaluation. MultiCom simulates diverse rater population by clustering contributors in a matrix-factorized rater space and prompting persona agents to generate structured assessments based on the official community notes rating schema. These agents output structured and explainable judgments, such as confidence, agreement signals and reasons. An out-of-fold calibrated aggregation algorithm combines features such as raw votes and diagnostic reason signals for reliable prediction. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MultiCom outperforms alternative methods, achieving an average accuracy of 84.7% (balanced accuracy 68.3%, macro-F1 60.1%) on the evaluation set.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

CCKS: Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing

arXiv:2606.12281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Decentralized Training and Decentralized Execution (DTDE) for cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), action-advising-based knowledge sharing promotes interpretable and scalable cooperation among agents. However, current action advising approaches often adhere too much to the teacher's guidance without evaluating teacher-student compatibility, which causes excessive advising, suboptimal stability, and degraded performance. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing (CCKS) framework, which allows agents to adopt recommendations based on consensus-derived constraints and to follow the teacher's instructions more smartly. This mechanism enables agents to balance exploration and learning from experienced teachers, improving overall performance. The key is the consensus model construction, for which we propose to employ contrastive learning to construct consensus models based on local observations in the agents' training phase. In action selection, agents score and choose actions based on consensus and shared knowledge. Designed as a plug-and-play solution, CCKS integrates seamlessly with existing DTDE algorithms. Experiments conducted in the Google Research Football environment and the complex StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge demonstrate that the integration with CCKS significantly improves cooperation efficiency, learning speed, and overall performance compared with current DTDE baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/yuanxpy/CCKS.

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

A Causal Model of Theory of Mind in Conflict for Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.16944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to ascribe mental states to others and use those ascriptions for prediction and inference, is widely assumed to be essential for effective human-machine integration. Existing AI-ToM models address how to mentalize, but leave the question of when largely unaddressed. The central question is: under what situational and agent-level conditions is ToM engagement causally warranted in conflict? This paper presents a structural causal model formalized as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), treating ToM as a mechanism activated by situational and agent-level conditions rather than as an always-on capacity. The model specifies four exogenous variables capturing situational and agent-level conditions, five endogenous mediators, and a mechanistic ToM node producing engagement states through three distinct causal pathways: a tractability pathway, a reasoning-depth pathway, and an enabling-cause pathway. The primary outcome is epistemic accuracy, which decouples social reasoning from behavioral policy and generalizes across social phenomena beyond conflict. The framework gives AI systems a principled, resource-rational decision procedure for mentalizing, with implications for efficiency, trust, and the development of robust artificial social intelligence. Simulation validation, empirical human-machine teaming studies, and ethical considerations arising from conflict-optimized mentalizing are discussed.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Proteomics Uncovers Cryptic JPH2 Loss in Paediatric Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Despite recent advances in next-generation sequencing, genetic diagnostic rates for dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) remain low. Among paediatric DCM, causes are often heritable, with a greater frequency of de novo, recessive and syndromic causes of disease. Novel diagnostic methods are therefore required to solve monogenic cases. To assess the value of proteomics as a diagnostic tool for paediatric DCM, we obtained left ventricle myocardial samples from paediatric patients undergoing heart transplantation at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne. We performed genome sequencing and proteomics and leveraged this multi-omics dataset to uncover the molecular cause of disease in a gene elusive proband. The proband carried a heterozygous JPH2 frameshift variant identified on clinical exome sequencing. However, proteomic analysis showed a pronounced downregulation of JPH2, suggestive of biallelic loss-of-function. Closer inspection of the genomic data revealed a large inversion (~8.34 Mb) with a breakpoint falling within intron 5 of JPH2 that displaces the 3'UTR from the coding transcript. The two variants were confirmed to be in trans using long read DNA sequencing, consistent with a diagnosis of JPH2 autosomal recessive DCM. Finally, we applied RNA sequencing with total RNA library preparation to show that transcripts containing a 3'UTR were reduced to ~10% relative to controls. As a proof-of-principle, we present the first reported use of proteomics from explanted cardiac tissue to provide a genetic diagnosis. Our methodology has broad relevance to patients with genetically unsolved Mendelian diseases, who might undergo organ transplantation as part of clinical management.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Applications: Segmentation, Editing, and Generation

In the context of novel view synthesis, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an efficient and competitive counterpart to Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), enabling high-fidelity photorealistic rendering in real time. Beyond novel view synthesis, the explicit and compact nature of 3DGS enables a wide range of downstream applications that require geometric and semantic understanding. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in 3DGS applications. It first reviews the reconstruction preliminaries of 3DGS, followed by the problem formulation, 2D foundation models, and related NeRF-based research areas that inform downstream 3DGS applications. We then categorize 3DGS applications into three foundational tasks: segmentation, editing, and generation, alongside additional functional applications built upon or tightly coupled with these foundational capabilities. For each, we summarize representative methods, supervision strategies, and learning paradigms, highlighting shared design principles and emerging trends. Commonly used datasets and evaluation protocols are also summarized, along with comparative analyses of recent methods across public benchmarks. To support ongoing research and development, a continually updated repository of papers, code, and resources is maintained at https://github.com/heshuting555/Awesome-3DGS-Applications.

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

HumP-KD: A Hybrid Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation Framework for Efficient Fire Classification

Real-time fire classification systems require models that are simultaneously accurate, computationally efficient, and deployable on resource-constrained hardware. This work proposes HumP-KD, a Hybrid Uncertainty-aware Multi-stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation framework for efficient fire classification. Two datasets, FlameVision and Dataset-II, containing 8,600 and 31,309 images, are used. Various CNN and transformer baselines are applied under standard preprocessing, online augmentation, Gaussian noise and motion blur robustness conditions. The proposed HumP-KD model distills knowledge from two frozen heterogeneous transformer teachers, Swin-Tiny and ViT-Base, along with their Meta-MLP ensemble, into a lightweight MobileViT-S student via three tightly integrated components. Hierarchical Progressive Knowledge Distillation employs a Hierarchical Feature Builder. It generates a fused spatial attention mask to guide distillation toward discriminative regions selectively. Multi-Stage Knowledge Distillation progressively activates three distillation stages across training. On Dataset-II, HumP-KD achieves a mean F1 score of $0.9876 \pm 0.0063$ across 10 independent trials, significantly outperforming the MobileViT-S baseline trained without distillation ($0.9537 \pm 0.0351$), with statistical significance confirmed by both independent t-test ($p = 0.0195$) and Wilcoxon signed-rank test ($W = 1$, $p = 0.0039$). The proposed method also demonstrates strong generalization across datasets and robustness under degraded visual conditions. The student model retains only 4.94M parameters and 19.01Mb model size, representing a $5.7\times$ parameter reduction over Swin-Tiny and a $17.5\times$ reduction over ViT-Base, while achieving 37.72 CPU FPS, making it suitable for real-time deployment.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Measurement-Calibrated Multi-Camera Fusion for Vision-Based Indoor Localization

Indoor vision-based localization systems are affected by detection noise, occlusions, and limited camera coverage, leading to uncertainty at multiple stages of the pipeline. While multi-camera data fusion is widely used to mitigate these issues, it is typically treated as a black-box component and evaluated solely end-to-end, obscuring its mechanistic contributions. To address this gap, this work investigates whether explicitly characterizing single-camera localization errors can be leveraged to calibrate and optimize multi-camera data fusion. We introduce a measurement-calibrated fusion approach that integrates component-wise error quantification, specifically isolating homography calibration, human detection, and motion tracking. A component-wise evaluation is conducted to quantify error contributions from homography calibration, human detection, and motion tracking. Experimental results show that data fusion improves localization accuracy compared to single-camera baselines. While measurement-calibrated fusion provides only limited improvement in absolute accuracy over standard fusion, it substantially reduces trajectory variance and improves motion smoothness, which are critical for applications requiring stable and continuous motion estimates. These results highlight the value of explicit error characterization when designing data fusion strategies for vision-based indoor positioning systems.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

IterCAD: An Iterative Multimodal Agent for Visually-Grounded CAD Generation and Editing

Computer-Aided Design is pivotal in modern manufacturing, yet existing automated methods predominantly rely on open-loop, one-shot generation, creating a mismatch with iterative real-world practices. In this paper, we present IterCAD, a unified multimodal agent framework for closed-loop, interactive CAD generation and editing. We formulate the task as a multi-turn interaction between a multimodal agent and an executable CAD sandbox, covering three tasks: Drawing-to-Code, Text-to-Code, and Interactive Editing. To support this, we develop a data synthesis pipeline incorporating advanced industrial manufacturing features to generate standard-compliant multi-view engineering drawings, complex code-editing tasks, and high-fidelity interaction trajectories. We optimize the agent via progressive SFT followed by geometry-aware reinforcement learning with viable-prefix masking to enhance code executability and geometric fidelity. Finally, we introduce the IterCAD-Bench evaluation suite and propose the Chamfer Distance Tolerance-Recall (CD-TR) curve alongside its AUC-TR metric, establishing a survivor-bias-free standard that unifies code validity and geometric precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IterCAD achieves highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both code executability and geometric precision, while exhibiting superior capabilities in closed-loop iterative refinement.