中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Geometry of critical discrete structures: long-range percolation on the hierarchical lattice and the discrete torus

Authors:
Arghyadeep Chatterjee↗Sourish Maniyar↗Sanchayan Sen↗

arXiv:2509.09589v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Consider (a) balls $\Lambda_n$ of growing volumes in the $d$-dimensional hierarchical lattice, and (b) the $d$-dimensional discrete torus $\mathbb{T}_n^d$ on $n^d$ vertices. Place edges independently between each pair of vertices $x\neq y\in\Lambda_n$ or $\mathbb{T}_n^d$ with probability $1-\exp(-\beta J(x, y) )$ where $J(x, y) \asymp \| x-y \|^{-\alpha}$ for some $0

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TrustErase: Auditable Instant Machine Unlearning with Passport-Embedded Representations

Authors:
Rutger Hendrix↗Leonardo G. Russo↗Concetto Spampinato↗Matteo Pennisi↗Giovanni Bellitto↗

arXiv:2606.17122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The demand for privacy-compliant AI has amplified the need for machine unlearning; yet, existing retraining or distillation-based methods remain unverifiable and computationally costly. We introduce TrustErase, a verifiable, data-free unlearning framework leveraging passport-embedded representations for instant, modular, and auditable forgetting. By treating passports as cryptographic keys within parameter-efficient adaptation layers, TrustErase enables the removal of specific classes or datasets through simple deactivation, without retraining, fine-tuning, or access to the original data. A singular value based decomposition conceals passports within model weights, ensuring that unlearning actions remain transparent and provably compliant. Evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 show that TrustErase matches or exceeds state-of-the-art benchmarks such as DELETE, L2UL, and Boundary Shrink, while operating in a strictly data-free regime. Ultimately, TrustErase establishes a new paradigm for trustworthy, accountable, and instantly forgettable AI systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

IsabeLLM: Automated Theorem Proving Applied to Formally Verifying Consensus

Authors:
Elliot Jones↗William Knottenbelt↗

arXiv:2606.18098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have led AI for Theorem Proving to become a promising means of formally verifying computer systems. Whilst formal verification is traditionally reserved for safety-critical systems due to the required amount of expertise and effort, AI can help to automate a large amount of this workload and make it far more accessible. Blockchain-based systems are becoming increasingly popular and are frequently targeted by malicious actors, often resulting in huge financial losses, highlighting the need to better verify these systems and mitigate vulnerabilities. Arguably the most important component of these systems is the consensus protocol, which allows nodes to agree on decisions in a potentially adversarial environment. In this paper, we improve upon IsabeLLM, the automated theorem proving tool in Isabelle. Namely, we implement a Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework, Error tracing and counterexample generation for improved context supplied to the Large Language Model. Compatibility with the latest version of Isabelle and Sledgehammer is also implemented for improved efficiency. We compare the performance of the two versions of IsabeLLM in their ability to complete the verification of Bitcoin's Proof of Work consensus.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Selecting Samples on Graphs: A Unified Dataset Pruning Framework for Lossless Training Acceleration

Authors:
Dongyue Wu↗Zilin Guo↗Xiaoyu Li↗Jiajia Liu↗Jingdong Chen↗Nong Sang↗Changxin Gao↗

The rapid growth of modern training datasets has significantly increased computational cost, motivating dataset pruning~(DP) methods which retain only a subset of informative samples to reduce training cost. Existing pruning criteria typically rely on either intrinsic signals that assess samples independently or extrinsic signals that promote diversity via pairwise relations. While effective in their own specific regimes, each captures only one aspect of sample utility and lacks robustness across different pruning ratios or data distribution. In this work, we present a unified graph-based DP framework. By modeling the dataset as a weighted graph, where node weights encode intrinsic value and edge weights encode extrinsic value, DP can be cast as a Maximum Weight Clique Problem (MWCP). Although MWCP is NP-hard, its structure admits a principled greedy solution based on sample-wise marginal gains. Under a few mild conditions, we further prove that this unified objective enjoys a formal approximation guarantee, which applies to a broad family of importance metrics and provides practical design guidelines. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing DP methods while substantially reducing training cost, reducing training time by over 40\% without sacrificing accuracy on ImageNet-1k with ResNet-50.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Triangular-Reference Schrödinger Bridges for Time Series Generation

Authors:
Gabriele Bocchi↗

arXiv:2605.27478v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Schrödinger bridges for time series (SBTS) generate synthetic paths by projecting, in relative entropy, a Brownian reference onto the path laws that match the joint distribution of the data on the observation grid. The Brownian reference, however, fixes the quadratic variation of the generated paths, which is restrictive when stochastic volatility, correlated noise, or rank-deficient covariance structures must be reproduced. We introduce "Triangular-Reference Schrödinger Bridges for Time Series" (TR-SBTS), which keeps the entropy-projection backbone of SBTS but replaces the Brownian reference by a triangular, volatility-informed, intervalwise frozen reference on a state augmented with latent covariance descriptors. The construction remains a single entropy projection on the augmented state: the minimiser is the \(h\)-transform of the reference, and on each frozen interval the optimal drift has the logarithmic-gradient form \(b^\star(t,x)=A\,\nabla\log H(t,x)\), intrinsic to the active covariance directions when the frozen covariance \(A\) is degenerate. We prove stability of the frozen approximation and consistency of the associated regularised kernel estimators, describe a reference-aware Nadaraya–Watson implementation of the conditional next-increment law, and evaluate the construction on numerical experiments.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Redesign Mixture-of-Experts Routers with Manifold Power Iteration

Authors:
Songhao Wu↗Ang Lv↗Ruobing Xie↗Yankai Lin↗

Router is the cornerstone component to the Mixture-of-Experts models. Serving as expert proxies, the rows of the router matrix compute their similarity to the MoE inputs to determine which subset of experts is activated. Ideally, each router row is designed to encode the expert matrix into this representative vector, such that its dot-product with token can better reflect token-expert affinity. However, there exists no design principles to enforce this condensation. In this paper, we propose to align each router row with the principal singular direction of the associated expert, as this direction provides the most expressive mathematical description of a matrix. Based on this principle, we propose a router redesign with Manifold Power Iteration (MPI). Specifically, it introduces a "Power-then-Retract" paradigm, where a power iteration step is performed on the router weights, followed by a retraction to impose a norm constraint to ensure both efficiency and stability. Theoretically, we show that MPI drives router rows to converge toward the principal singular directions of associated experts. Empirically, we pretrain MoE model across scales from 1B to 11B parameters to confirm that this alignment facilitates more effective MoE models.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Beyond the Commitment Boundary: Probing Epiphenomenal Chain-of-Thought in Large Reasoning Models

Authors:
Daniel Scalena↗Sara Candussio↗Luca Bortolussi↗Elisabetta Fersini↗Malvina Nissim↗Gabriele Sarti↗

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is the dominant paradigm for inference-time scaling in language models, yet the causal influence of individual steps on the final answer poorly understood. We estimate each step's causal importance via early exit and use this measure to study how answers form across the reasoning traces of several model families. Across diverse tasks, we find that reasoning typically crosses a commitment boundary – a sharp transition from transient intermediate guesses to a stable, high-confidence answer. This transition often happens in a single step, well before the model's reasoning block ends, and is followed by epiphenomenal CoT steps that leave the final answer probability unaltered. Using attention probes, we show that answer-formation stages can be linearly decoded from intermediate reasoning steps with high accuracy and generalize robustly to unseen reasoning tasks. We exploit this signal to early-exit reasoning blocks at the commitment boundary, reducing the length of CoTs up to 55\% on average with negligible impact on model performance.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

ARIADNE: Agnostic Routing for Inference-time Adapter DyNamic sElection

Authors:
Enrico Cassano↗Micha{\l} Brzozowski↗Zuzanna Dubanowska↗Paolo Mandica↗Neo Christopher Chung↗

arXiv:2606.19079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing deployment of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has led to model ecosystems in which a single backbone is paired with many task-specialized adapters. In this setting, inference-time queries often arrive without task labels, requiring the system to automatically select the most appropriate adapter from a growing and heterogeneous adapter pool. Existing routing methods either depend on access to adapter internals, such as weight decompositions or gradient-based statistics, or require additional router training, which limits scalability and portability as new adapters are added. We introduce ARIADNE, a training-free, adapter-agnostic routing framework for dynamic adapter selection at inference time. ARIADNE represents each adapter through a set of centroids computed from embeddings of its training set, capturing the data distribution associated with that adapter. Given an unlabeled input, it selects an adapter by measuring proximity to these centroids in latent space. Because routing is performed entirely in the input embedding space, ARIADNE is compatible with arbitrary PEFT methods and requires no modification to the adapters or training procedures. Primarily evaluated with Llama 3.2 1B Instruct on 23 diverse NLP tasks, ARIADNE recovers 97.44% of the upper bound performance. Scaling to 44 tasks, it achieves 89.7% average selection accuracy, without additional training or access to adapter internals.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Dual Dimensionality for Local and Global Attention

Authors:
Zhiyuan Wang↗Xuan Luo↗Sirui Zeng↗Xifeng Yan↗

Decoder-only Transformers compute attention over the KV cache of preceding tokens. Keys (and Values) are typically represented with the same dimensionality, regardless of its distance from the prediction target. In natural language, however, the next word is most strongly influenced by the immediately preceding tokens. We hypothesize that local and distant tokens impose asymmetric demands on representational capacity: local tokens are more critical for predicting immediate outputs and thus require richer representations, whereas distant tokens primarily serve as long-range memory, for which lower-dimensional representations may suffice. We formalize this idea as Distance-Adaptive Representation (DAR), implemented in a controlled setting that preserves full-dimensional representations within a local context window while assigning reduced-dimensional representations (e.g. 1/4 of the original dimensionality) to tokens beyond that window. Across multiple pretraining scales (70M to 410M parameters), as well as continued supervised fine-tuning on a 1B-scale model, this approach closely matches the performance of full-dimensional baselines. In contrast, uniformly reducing dimensionality across all token positions leads to worse performance. These results challenge the common assumption that key and value dimensionality should be uniform across token positions. Our findings suggest a new direction for designing attention architectures that adaptively allocate representational capacity across sequences, enabling further reductions in KV cache during inference.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems: Mitigating Semantic Drift with the Argent Signaling Protocol

Authors:
Anantha Sharma↗

When multi-agent LLM systems produce bad answers, not all failures are equal: some answers are grounded in the right material but incomplete, while others are simply ungrounded and should be stopped. Current retry strategies treat both cases identically (try again and hope for the best), leaving human supervisors unable to tell whether a retry was warranted or whether the system should have halted instead. We introduce the Argent Signaling Protocol (ASP), a compact machine-readable header that accompanies every AI-generated response with structured quality signals: certainty (@C), grounding (@G), stochasticity (@S), and an assumption index that classifies the evidentiary basis of each claim. These signals enable a controller to distinguish repairable failures from containment failures and route each case differently. We evaluate ASP in two modes. In standalone mode, a 27-question document-grounded QA benchmark over the Array BioPharma/Ono license agreement compares baseline prompts against ASP-instrumented controller actions across three local GGUF models. On Qwen~(0.8B), ASP improves pass rate from 11.1% to 33.3% and mean term coverage from 36.7% to 65.4%; on Dobby~(8B), ASP produces 4 fail-to-pass recoveries, raising pass rate from 33.3% to 44.4%; on SmolLM3~(3B), ASP alternates between repair and containment per question. Aggregate improvement is meaningful (12/81 to 21/81 passes). In multi-agent mode, an ASP sidecar sits between a retrieval agent and a downstream decision agent; the sidecar blocks 100% of ungrounded upstream outputs from reaching the downstream agent (24/27 blocked, 0 ungrounded propagations).

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Gaming-Resistant Insurance Contracts for Autonomous AI Agents: Strategy-Proof Toll Mechanism Design

Authors:
Hao-Hsuan Chen↗

arXiv:2606.16326v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Paper A defines a time-consistent actuarial runtime that prices each side-effect-bearing action against a contractually fixed safe default and gates execution against a reserve budget. It treats the operator as passive. This paper makes the operator strategic. We characterise a five-attack space for autonomous AI-agent insurance contracts and prove when the actuarial runtime is gaming-resistant. Two attack surfaces – post-toll safe-default selection and within-boundary action splitting – are closed by Paper A's minimal-authority and no-splitting clauses. The remaining three require new contract clauses. First, common-control aggregation prevents cross-boundary re-routing from reducing toll below the boundary potential applied to total exposure. Second, interface failures such as invalid JSON are contract-relevant events, not safety wins: treating them as zero-toll safe defaults can reward unreliable models, while escalation fees reverse the incentive. We validate this interface-compliance theorem on committed cross-model traces from the companion empirical paper. Third, a model-identity menu with a componentwise-minimum penalty schedule makes truthful reporting of the deployed model weakly dominant. We then compose these clauses with Paper A's runtime guarantees to obtain joint incentive compatibility over the five-attack space. Finally, a two-parameter premium family discharges operator individual rationality and weak budget balance at the truthful equilibrium. The result is an incentive-compatibility layer for actuarial control of autonomous-agent side effects.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

The Market in the Model: Latent Diffusion as Neural Economy

Authors:
Eryk Salvaggio↗

Valuable critique of generative image models within visual culture and the humanities has emphasized the role of datasets in shaping the images they produce. Yet, close studies of the ideological positions embedded into the mechanism of the models have been neglected, leaving them imagined as "black boxes." In a bid to expand, rather than replace, dataset critique, this paper examines the mechanisms of the latent diffusion model in terms of the problems they were brought in to solve on behalf of computer vision engineers, and the decisions each component was tasked with automating. I interpret that ensemble through the histories of its parts and the theory of vision the system inscribes into every generated image. Drawing on Impett and Offert's notion of neural exchange value, I offer this analysis to argue that the model operates as a neural economy: a contained symbolic system that abstracts social communication into commensurable vectors as it transfers the social sphere into parcels for sale. Tracing the training and generation pipelines component by component reveals what each operation displaces, and how it further entrenches the logics of platform and attention economies over social communication. The paper warns that any critique fixated exclusively on copyright and commodity defenses risks reaffirming the very fetishism the model produces, and argues instead for centering social exchange.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Unifying Quantum Smoothing Theories with Extended Retrodiction

Authors:
Mingxuan Liu↗Ge Bai↗Valerio Scarani↗

arXiv:2510.08447v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating the state of an open quantum system monitored over time requires incorporating information from past measurements (filtering) and, for improved accuracy, also from future measurements (smoothing). While classical smoothing is well understood within a Bayesian framework, its quantum generalization has been challenging, leading to distinct and seemingly incompatible approaches. In this work, we demonstrate that quantum state smoothing hinges on a uniquely quantum feature: the fundamental dependence of retrodiction on prior correlations. We introduce auxiliary systems into the prior belief to capture correlations formed during preparation and evolution and develop a comprehensive framework for quantum state smoothing based on extended Bayesian retrodiction. This framework identifies all previous approaches as different choices of the extended prior, and naturally extends it to other choices that have not been considered before. We also give an information-theoretic characterization of the choices of prior, in terms of the average entropy of the smoothed states. Our results establish quantum state smoothing as a fundamentally retrodictive process just like classical smoothing, with proper quantum features clearly identified.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Not All Retrievals are Useful: Cross-Attention for Input-Aware RAG in Time Series Forecasting

Authors:
Seunghan Lee↗Jaehoon Lee↗Jun Seo↗Sungdong Yoo↗Minjae Kim↗Tae Yoon Lim↗Dongwan Kang↗Hwanil Choi↗SoonYoung Lee↗Wonbin Ahn↗

arXiv:2603.14709v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances zero-shot time series (TS) forecasting by leveraging external knowledge bases, yet existing approaches overlook input-level relevance when fusing retrieved samples with the query. We argue that not all retrievals are equally useful, and irrelevant ones can degrade performance. To this end, we propose Cross-RAG, a zero-shot RAG-based forecasting framework that selectively attends to query-relevant retrieved samples via query–retrieval cross-attention. By modeling input-level relevance between the query and retrieved samples, Cross-RAG jointly incorporates three sources of information: 1) the query itself, 2) the retrieved samples, and 3) their relational interactions. In particular, this input-aware design enables Cross-RAG to remain stable as the number of retrieved samples $k$ grows, whereas prior methods without cross-attention require careful $k$ tuning to avoid degradation from irrelevant retrievals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Cross-RAG consistently improves zero-shot forecasting performance across multiple TSFM backbones and various RAG methods, with additional analyses confirming its effectiveness across various retrieval scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/cross-rag/.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Landscape-Similarity-Guided Optimization in Divide-and-Conquer QAOA

Authors:
Sokea Sang↗Leanghok Hour↗Sanghyeon Lee↗Aniket Patra↗Hee Chul Park↗Moon Jip Park↗Youngsun Han↗

arXiv:2602.21689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Divide-and-conquer strategies mitigate hardware constraints for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices by partitioning large interaction graphs into smaller, hardware-compatible sub-problems. However, this approach introduces a severe classical training bottleneck: a decomposition across $m$ boundary nodes generates $2^m$ distinct sub-problems that typically require independent optimization. In this work, we demonstrate that across diverse synthetic and real-world interaction graphs, the variational landscapes of these reduced QAOA instances actually exhibit a robust universality. Adapting the replica-overlap framework of spin-glass physics, we define a landscape-overlap order parameter $q$ to quantify geometric correlations between energy landscapes, revealing a sharp landscape-similarity transition as graph connectivity is tuned. Exploiting this, we introduce Doubly Optimized QAOA (DO-QAOA), an adaptive pipeline that collapses the sub-problems from $2^m$ distinct sub-problems into $K=\mathcal{O}(1)$ effective landscape classes. By performing optimization on a single representative sub-problem and dynamically transferring parameters to remaining sub-problems, DO-QAOA lowers runtime and quantum measurement overhead by orders of magnitude while maintaining a competitive Approximation Ratio Gap (ARG).

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Revealing Hidden Vulnerabilities in Autoencoders through Gradient Signal Restoration

Authors:
Chethan Krishnamurthy Ramanaik↗Arjun Roy↗Tobias Callies↗Eirini Ntoutsi↗

Adversarial robustness of deep autoencoders (AEs) has received less attention than that of discriminative models, although their compressed latent representations induce ill-conditioned mappings that can amplify small input perturbations and destabilize reconstructions. Existing white-box attacks for AEs, which optimize norm-bounded adversarial perturbations to maximize reconstruction damage, often converge to suboptimal perturbations, thereby potentially overstating AE robustness. We show that this limitation is linked to vanishing adversarial loss gradients during backpropagation through ill-conditioned layers, associated with near-zero singular values in their intermediate weight matrices. To address this, we propose GRILL (Gradient Signal Restoration in Ill-Conditioned Layers), a framework designed to mitigate gradient degradation and improve the reliability of adversarial robustness evaluation in encoder-decoder architectures. GRILL is designed to mitigate adversarial gradient degradation during optimization, enabling attacks to better approximate high-distortion perturbations under fixed norm constraints. Through extensive experiments across multiple AE architectures, under both sample-specific and universal attacks, as well as standard and adaptive attack settings, we show that GRILL significantly increases attack effectiveness, thereby exposing vulnerabilities hidden by existing attack limitations. Beyond AEs, we provide preliminary evidence that modern multimodal encoder-decoder architectures exhibit similar vulnerabilities.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Understanding LLMs in Title-Abstract Screening: From Disagreements to Recommendations

Authors:
Mika M\"antyl\"a↗Patricia Matsubara↗Katia Romero Felizardo↗Miikka Kuutila↗Marco Gerosa↗Savio de Sousa Sampaio↗Tayana Conte↗Igor Steinmacher↗

arXiv:2606.17588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Several studies have examined the use of large language models (LLMs) for title-abstract screening in systematic reviews (SRs), reporting mixed accuracy. However, questions of reliability remain largely unaddressed. In this study, we go beyond quantitative LLM-human agreement metrics and qualitatively investigate how and why LLMs fail. We also propose actionable recommendations. We analyzed disagreements between LLMs and researchers across six software engineering SRs and over 1,000 primary study papers. For each SR, papers were screened independently by human experts and LLMs in zero-shot mode, resulting in Kappa values ranging from 0.52 to 0.77. Qualitative analysis suggests that human-LLM disagreement results from recurring, identifiable causes, such as boundary ambiguity in key terms, keyword overemphasization, and incorrect topic inference. Based on these findings, we propose recommendations such as validating semantic understanding before deployment, running multiple LLMs, and focusing validation efforts on borderline cases. Future studies are needed to validate the impact of our recommendations, and community efforts are needed to develop normative guidelines on LLM usage in SRs.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Cluster Aggregated GAN (CAG): A Cluster-Based Hybrid Model for Appliance Pattern Generation

Authors:
Zikun Guo↗Adeyinka. P. Adedigba↗Rammohan Mallipeddi↗

arXiv:2512.22287v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic appliance data are essential for developing non-intrusive load monitoring algorithms and enabling privacy preserving energy research, yet the scarcity of labeled datasets remains a significant barrier. Recent GAN-based methods have demonstrated the feasibility of synthesizing load patterns, but most existing approaches treat all devices uniformly within a single model, neglecting the behavioral differences between intermittent and continuous appliances and resulting in unstable training and limited output fidelity. To address these limitations, we propose the Cluster Aggregated GAN framework, a hybrid generative approach that routes each appliance to a specialized branch based on its behavioral characteristics. For intermittent appliances, a clustering module groups similar activation patterns and allocates dedicated generators for each cluster, ensuring that both common and rare operational modes receive adequate modeling capacity. Continuous appliances follow a separate branch that employs an LSTM-based generator to capture gradual temporal evolution while maintaining training stability through sequence compression. Extensive experiments on the UVIC smart plug dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms baseline methods across metrics measuring realism, diversity, and training stability, and that integrating clustering as an active generative component substantially improves both interpretability and scalability. These findings establish the proposed framework as an effective approach for synthetic load generation in non-intrusive load monitoring research.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Cortical development dynamics across autism spectrum disorder mouse models

Authors:
Lena A. Schwarz↗

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.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

Catecholamine precursor modulation of human exploration: Evidence from a large gender-balanced sample

Authors:
Angela Mariele Brands↗

by Angela Mariele Brands, Kilian Knauth, David Mathar, Tim Roedder, Kerstin Lisner, Jan Peters The catecholamine precursor Tyrosine has been linked to improved cognitive performance, but investigations into decision-making and reinforcement learning processes known to be under catecholamine control are sparse. We examined the impact of a single dose of Tyrosine (2g) on reinforcement learning and exploration in a large (n = 63) gender-balanced sample in a within-subjects preregistered study. Reinforcement learning performance was significantly improved under Tyrosine. Based on previous work, we preregistered the hypotheses that Tyrosine would reduce directed exploration, response times, and physiological arousal. However, neither response times nor physiological arousal revealed the predicted reductions. Computational modelling using an established pre-registered reinforcement learning model revealed that the performance improvement under Tyrosine was due to an increase value-driven exploitation, without affecting directed exploration. Non-preregistered modelling analyses then revealed that accounting for higher-order perseveration substantially improved model fit, and substantiated the observation of increased value-driven exploitation under Tyrosine. Furthermore, it revealed reliable reductions in directed exploration and value-independent perseveration under Tyrosine. Tyrosine thus improved reinforcement learning performance by stabilizing choice patterns in the service of optimizing reward accumulation, modulating several computational mechanisms thought to be under catecholamine control.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

A Mechanistic Understanding of Pronoun Fidelity in LLMs

Authors:
Katharina Trinley↗Jesujoba O. Alabi↗Dietrich Klakow↗Vagrant Gautam↗

Faithful and robust pronoun use is important for fair and coherent generations, yet large language models largely fail when multiple referents use different pronouns. To study the interplay of reasoning, repetition, and bias in this task, prior work relies exclusively on behavioural approaches, which may not reflect a model's internal workings. Therefore, we provide a mechanistic, model-internal perspective on pronoun fidelity, testing whether three mechanisms – group entity binding (G), recency bias (R), and stereotypical bias (S) – are causally implemented across several SOTA language models. Using Boundless Distributed Alignment Search, we find all three coexist as causal subspaces distributed across network depth. No single mechanism fully explains model behaviour, but a combination of the three consistently accounts for 91-99.5%. An attention head analysis further reveals two competing copying routes; group binding and stereotype share a localized concept-level route that retrieves a bound occupation-pronoun unit, while recency uses a distributed token-level route that repeats surface forms. In sum, pronoun fidelity arises from competition between simultaneously active causal subspaces.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Closing the Social-Semantic Gap: SPSD for Edge-Based Prompt Compression in Cloud LLM Inference

Authors:
Abhinit Sen↗Ajeet Kumar↗Manaranjan Pradhan↗

arXiv:2606.19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prefill stage of Large Language Model (LLM) inference is a growing contributor to cloud-scale energy cost. Many consumer-support and conversational prompts contain social scaffolding: politeness markers, apologetic preamble, repetition, and rapport-building language that is important for human communication but carries low marginal information for machine reasoning. We call this discrepancy the Social-Semantic Gap. We present SPSD (Sentiment Preserving Semantic Distillation), an edge-based pipeline that compresses user prompts using a 4-bit quantised Small Language Model before transmission to a cloud-deployed LLM. Evaluation on a 248-prompt corpus using Gemma-2-2B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) as the SLM and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as the cloud evaluation model yields a mean input token saving of 99.9 tokens per distilled call, with all 146 distilled calls yielding positive savings. Response quality, assessed by blind LLM-as-judge scoring across 121 pairs, is non-inferior to the raw path within a pre-specified 1-point margin on a 15-point rubric; the judge awarded 43 percent ties, 28 percent distilled wins, and 29 percent raw wins. Cosine similarity is mixed: mean 0.682, median 0.712, with 54.1 percent of pairs above the 0.70 reference threshold. Safety-critical domains are conservatively routed to passthrough via rule-based gates. Per-call net energy saving is estimated at 70-270 uWh under stated assumptions. SPSD shows that on-device prompt distillation can reduce cloud LLM input-token cost while preserving response quality within a practical non-inferiority margin.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

FitText: Evolving Agent Tool Ecologies via Memetic Retrieval

Authors:
Kyle Zheng↗Han Zhang↗Renliang Sun↗Chenchen Ye↗Wei Wang↗

arXiv:2605.02411v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A semantic gap separates how users describe tasks from how tools are documented. As API ecosystems scale to tens of thousands of endpoints, static retrieval from the initial query alone cannot bridge this gap: the agent's understanding of what it needs evolves during execution, but its tool set does not. We identify this retrieval interface, not planning, as the binding constraint on end-to-end agent performance, and introduce FitText, a training-free framework that makes retrieval dynamic by embedding it directly in the agent's reasoning loop. FitText treats retrieval as test-time evolution of hypotheses: the agent generates natural-language pseudo-tool descriptions (revisable beliefs about the tool it needs), refines them iteratively using retrieval feedback, and explores diverse alternatives through stochastic generation. Memetic Retrieval adds evolutionary selection pressure over candidate descriptions, guided by a tool memory that avoids redundant search. On ToolRet (three domains), FitText's reformulation strategies improve NDCG@5 by 2.7 to 10.6 points over static query retrieval across all base models; on StableToolBench (16,464 APIs) with GPT-5.4-mini, Memetic reaches an 84.3% pooled pass rate, a 26.7-point absolute gain over static query retrieval.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

REACH: Interpretability-Driven Feature Identification and Architecture Compression for Multi-Channel Vehicular Channel Estimation

Authors:
Simbarashe Aldrin Ngorima↗Albert Helberg↗Marelie H. Davel↗

arXiv:2606.11857v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-channel mixed-SNR training improves out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation of deep learning channel estimators for IEEE 802.11p vehicular communications, yet the internal mechanism responsible for this remains unexplained. This work presents REACH (Relevance-based Explanation and Architectural Compression for cHannel estimators), a gradient-based interpretability framework that operates at two levels. Input-level attribution identifies a subset of time-frequency features consistently relevant across all evaluated channel conditions, enabling input dimensionality reduction with minimal performance loss. Filter-level attribution reveals a near-universal internal representation, providing a representational account of the observed OOD generalisation. Guided by the resulting filter taxonomy, relevance-guided architecture compression substantially reduces both the number of parameters and the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) with sub-1 dB normalised mean square error (NMSE) degradation, and OOD generalisation degrades more slowly than within-distribution accuracy under increasing compression.

Read & Discuss → View Source →