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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

The Target48 Neurodegeneration Panel: A Novel Tool for Profiling Protein Signatures in Neurodegenerative Disorders

Introduction: Novel tools for absolute quantification of established and emerging fluid neuro-biomarkers are required to advance diagnostic studies and improve biological insights. Methods: We conducted an extensive analytical and clinical validation of the Olink Target 48 Neurodegeneration panel (T48 Neuropanel) in 352 paired CSF and plasma samples from cognitively unimpaired controls (CU), Alzheimer dementia (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), n=44 per group. Comparisons with benchmark assays were performed. Results: Good detectability (CSF: 31 out of 42 assays; plasma: 38 out of 42 assays) and technical performance was observed. Benchmark assays showed good correlations, supporting method transformation formulas. Next to emerging biomarkers (MMP10, ITGB2), discriminative performance was excellent in AD: CSF pTau217: AUC=1; FTD: plasma NfL: AUC=0.952; and DLB: CSF DDC: AUC=0.901. Discussion: This analytical and clinical validation of the T48 Neuropanel highlights initial cut-offs and emerging biomarkers to aid clinical studies for the diagnosis, prognosis, and monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases. Highlights: The T48 Neuropanel shows robust analytical performance, with high detectability across both plasma and CSF matrices. The T48 Neuropanel validates established (i.e., pTau217, Abeta42, NfL, and GFAP) and emerging biomarkers (i.e., DDC, MMP10, ITGB2, ITGAM, NPTX2, NPTXR, SMOC1, sTREM1, and sTREM2) in CSF and plasma. CSF NfL, GFAP, ITGB2, and ITGAM and plasma GFAP were dysregulated across AD, FTD, and DLB dementias. -The multiplex design of the T48 Neuropanel enables rich biological interpretation by simultaneously quantifying established and emerging neurodegeneration biomarkers. Importantly, the inclusion of absolute quantification facilitates the establishment of cut-offs, supporting its potential for clinical translation.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

$\mathcal{PT}$-Symmetric Spin–Boson Model with a Continuous Bosonic Spectrum: Exceptional Points and Dynamics

arXiv:2512.20277v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work studies a $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric non-Hermitian spin–boson model, consisting of a non-Hermitian two-level system coupled to a continuous bosonic bath. The static properties of the system are analyzed through a projection method derived from the displacement operator. We find that only a single exceptional point (EP) emerges, in contrast to non-Hermitian spin–boson models with finite modes, which typically exhibit multiple EPs. Notably, only a single real eigenvalue is found before the EP, which differs markedly from typical non-Hermitian systems where a pair of real eigenvalues precedes the EP. The time evolution of observables is further investigated via the Dirac–Frenkel time-dependent variational principle. Compared to its Hermitian counterpart, the non-Hermitian model exhibits distinct dynamical signatures, most notably the emergence of oscillations with periodic amplified amplitude. In the $\mathcal{PT}$-unbroken phase, the system exhibits sustained oscillatory dynamics with suppressed decoherence, whereas in the $\mathcal{PT}$-broken phase, additional dissipative channels accelerate decoherence and drive rapid convergence toward a stable steady state. These results shed light on how $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry protects coherent light–matter interactions in non-Hermitian quantum systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TimeVista: Exploring and Exploiting Vision-Language Models as Judges for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality time series forecasting is pivotal for real-world decision-making. However, traditional point-wise metrics often fail to reveal complex temporal patterns and align poorly with human intuitive preferences. While the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' paradigm has revolutionized text evaluation by providing flexible, human-aligned judgment, its application to time series remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as judges for time series forecasting, harnessing their ability to comprehend time series plots grounded in textual information. Specifically, we propose a novel framework integrating micro- and macro-level judgments informed by contextual information to evaluate time series forecasting. To this end, we introduce TimeVista, a comprehensive VLM-as-a-Judge benchmark comprising 5563 time series samples paired with detailed evaluation rubrics. Extensive meta-evaluations demonstrate that VLMs are highly reliable judges, achieving significantly higher consistency with human preferences than conventional metrics. Building upon our benchmark, we comprehensively assess recent Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) under the VLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Our results demonstrate that VLMs serve as robust and interpretable judges, providing a comprehensive, human-aligned standard for evaluating time series models.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Reroute, Don't Remove: Recoverable Visual Token Routing for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) project images into hundreds to thousands of visual tokens, making decoder inference expensive in both attention computation and KV-cache memory. Existing visual-token reduction methods largely follow a rank-and-remove paradigm: they score visual tokens, keep a compact subset, and permanently discard the rest. We show that this irreversible action is fragile because visual-token importance changes across decoder depth; tokens ranked low at one stage may become relevant in later layers, especially for grounding-sensitive queries. We propose Reroute, a training-free plug-in that replaces removal with recoverable routing. At each routing stage, selected vision tokens pass through decoder blocks, while deferred tokens bypass the stage and re-enter the candidate pool at the next routing decision. Reroute reuses existing attention-score ranking rules and stage-wise schedules, preserving the theoretical TFLOPs and KV-cache budget class of the pruning method it augments. Across FastV, PDrop, and Nüwa variants on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen backbones, reroute improves grounding under aggressive token reduction while maintaining general VQA performance. These results suggest that VLM token reduction should not be viewed only as irreversible pruning, but also as recoverable routing. The code can be found here: https://github.com/elmma/mllm-reroute/

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

A Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network Framework for Multi-Horizon Stroke Mortality Prediction

Background: Machine learning models for stroke mortality prediction typically treat each time horizon independently and use flat tabular features that ignore the relational structure of electronic health records (EHRs). In this pilot study, we leveraged graph-based machine learning models to predict post stroke all-cause-mortality across three different time horizons. Methods: We developed Stroke Temporal Heterogeneous Graph (StrokeTHG), a heterogeneous graph neural network model for simultaneous multi-horizon stroke mortality prediction (30-day, 90-day, 1-year) using EHR data from Penn State Health System. The model encodes various relations among EHR entities (e.g., patient, diagnosis, comorbidity) and temporal encoding of admission time to better predict stroke mortality. We compared our proposed approach against various baseline methods, including Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and XGBoost. We also performed ablation and subgroup analyses, evaluated the quality of learned graph embeddings, and assessed the importance of different edge types in the graph. Results: We included 4,144 stroke patients (mean age 69.2 years; 54.3% men), of whom 3,332 (80.4%) survived their stroke after one year. 30-day, 90-day, and 1-year mortality rates were 9.7%, 13.7%, and 19.6%, respectively. Our proposed approach, StrokeTHG, achieved AUROC of 0.872, 0.878, and 0.837 across horizons, outperforming all tabular baselines. At [≥] , 75% specificity, the model identified 5-10 percentage points more mortality cases than the best baseline at each horizon. Subgroup analysis demonstrated consistent performance across sex subgroups and the largest discriminative gains in the Age 65-80 stratum. Edge-type ablation identified phenotype-patient and admission-patient edges in the constructed EHR graph as the most influential relational edges for mortality prediction. StrokeTHG embeddings outperformed all graph and matrix factorization baselines under an identical downstream classifier, confirming that performance gains stem from representation quality rather than classifier capacity. Conclusions: StrokeTHG demonstrates that heterogeneous graph representations of EHR data provide a consistent improvement over flat tabular models for multi-horizon stroke mortality prediction, with particular advantage at clinically actionable sensitivity thresholds and novel multi-horizon monotonic prediction capability. This methodological framework may be adaptable to other EHR-based clinical research studies seeking to leverage heterogeneous relational structures for predictive modeling.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Circulators Based on Coupled Quantum Anomalous Hall Insulators and Resonators

arXiv:2505.07770v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrated plasmonics is advancing rapidly, enabling a wide range of functionalities to be incorporated onto a single chip. Applications span information processing, computation, quantum sensing, and dark-matter detection. This progress has driven the development of integrated non-reciprocal devices, which are essential for preventing unwanted feedback that can degrade system performance. While non-reciprocal devices have been realized in edge magnetoplasmon materials via classical interference effects, their operation is often limited by the input power range. Here, we demonstrate that topological circulators utilizing asymmetric coupling offer improved input power range, isolation, and insertion loss. In this configuration, we demonstrate the coupling between a chiral edge magnetoplasmonic resonator and a pair of LC resonators is well described by an effective non-Hermitian two-site Hatano-Nelson model with asymmetric directional couplings, resulting in nonreciprocal behavior. The coherent photon-plasmon interaction enables a circulator with up to 50 dB of isolation across a broad range of excitation power. These results suggest that magnetic topological insulators provide a promising platform for realizing asymmetric non-Hermitian couplings at radio frequencies and for exploring regimes of strong directional suppression and possible exceptional-point physics. More broadly, they highlight the potential of topological-material-based microwave devices for future integration with superconducting quantum information platforms.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606.08530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments. We argue that this stems from the lack of a unified geometry-aware manipulation representation, leaving existing VLAs vulnerable to low-level trajectory supervision, misaligned 3D features, and embodiment differences. To address this, we propose GEAR-VLA, a VLA framework for learning unified geometry-aware action representations for generalizable robotic manipulation. GEAR-VLA adopts coarse-to-fine action learning, where multi-source embodied pretraining equips the VLM with embodied reasoning and discrete action understanding before latent action tokens connect action semantics to a gradient-decoupled DiT continuous action expert. It further performs semantic-aligned 3D integration by aligning a trainable 3D spatial backbone with the VLA representation while freezing the original VLM-aligned visual pathway. To share this representation across robots, GEAR-VLA uses embodiment canonicalization, where embodiment-aware states and embodiment-invariant actions confine robot differences to the low-level interface. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate strong generalization: GEAR-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, reaches 85.9% success on AgileX and 81.0% on the pretraining-unseen LDT-01 embodiment, and obtains 90.1% success on a 6,360-trial universal grasping benchmark with 212 unseen objects. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/babynabeauty/GEAR-VLA.

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

Density Ridge Selective Prediction for LLM and VLM Hallucination Detection under Calibration Label Scarcity

Hallucination detection in large language and vision-language models is increasingly framed as selective prediction, where a detector assigns a confidence score and abstains when confidence is low. Unsupervised sampling detectors (Semantic Entropy) avoid labels but plateau in quality, while supervised probes attain stronger in-distribution scores yet degrade sharply when calibration labels are scarce. We recover the response manifold of an LLM as the density ridge of a kernel density estimate built on a six-dimensional kinematic feature map of hidden state generation trajectories. A test generation is scored by the negated Euclidean distance from its projected feature point to the nearest ridge vertex, yielding a low-dimensional geometric skeleton of the stochastic output distribution. We evaluate against Semantic Entropy, topological methods, and log-probability on six QA benchmarks (HaluEval-QA, TriviaQA, GSM8K, POPE, ScienceQA, A-OKVQA) using eight text and vision LLMs in a deliberately label-scarce protocol ($n_{cal}{=}200$ queries, $N{=}5$ generations). Our ridge-based score beats on AUROC with 5-20 points gain, while demonstrating tempered degradation under calibration-label scarcity.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Arrival times of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate

arXiv:2606.20281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The times of flight of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate are theoretically investigated in the experimentally unexplored regime corresponding to detection close to the trap of the condensate. In this regime, there is no consensus on how to calculate the distribution of times of arrival onto the detector. For non-interacting particles, distinct theoretical predictions have been made in the past. This work analyses how these predictions are modified for an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate. For this purpose, a time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation is solved analytically and numerically.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Standardized Methods and Recommendations for Green Federated Learning

arXiv:2602.00343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training over privacy-sensitive, distributed data, but its environmental impact is difficult to compare across studies due to inconsistent measurement boundaries and heterogeneous reporting. We present a practical carbon-accounting methodology for FL CO2e tracking using NVIDIA NVFlare and CodeCarbon for explicit, phase-aware tasks (initialization, per-round training, evaluation, and idle/coordination). To capture non-compute effects, we additionally estimate communication emissions from transmitted model-update sizes under a network-configurable energy model. We validate the proposed approach on two representative workloads: CIFAR-10 image classification and retinal optic disk segmentation. In CIFAR-10, controlled client-efficiency scenarios show that system-level slowdowns and coordination effects can contribute meaningfully to carbon footprint under an otherwise fixed FL protocol, increasing total CO2e by 8.34x (medium) and 21.73x (low) relative to the high-efficiency baseline. In retinal segmentation, swapping GPU tiers (H100 vs.\ V100) yields a consistent 1.7x runtime gap (290 vs. 503 minutes) while producing non-uniform changes in total energy and CO2e across sites, underscoring the need for per-site and per-round reporting. Overall, our results support a standardized carbon accounting method that acts as a prerequisite for reproducible 'green' FL evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Pediatric-Accelerated-Intelligence-Lab/carbon_footprint.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Energy-Conserved Neural Pipelines: Attenuating Error Propagation in Modular Neural Networks via Physical Conservation Constraints

arXiv:2606.11341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modular neural network pipelines suffer from error compounding: noise at any module boundary propagates and potentially amplifies through subsequent modules. We introduce energy conservation as a hard physical constraint on inter-module information flow. Activation energy (the squared L2 norm of feature vectors) is enforced to be exactly preserved at every module boundary. Unlike soft energy penalties, conservation is an inviolable law: the network may redistribute energy across neurons but cannot create or destroy it. Four experiments on CIFAR-10 demonstrate: (1) conservation retains 77.4% of clean accuracy at noise sigma=0.2, versus 35.1% for baselines and 30.9% for energy-penalized models (p

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

Learning Sparse Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Multimodal Neuroimaging

Brain MRIs are routinely acquired as multiple complementary sequences with unique contrast weighting, including T1-weighed imaging (T1w) anatomic and fluid-sensitive T2-weighted (T2w) contrasts. However, methods for learning unified representations across the multitude of MRI contrast mechanisms at health-system scale are lacking. In this study, we introduce Neuro-JEPA, a sparse multimodal neuroimaging foundation model that combines a latent predictive objective with a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to encode brain MRI across core T1w, T2w, and fluid-suppressed FLAIR imaging (FLAIR). We further provide a systematic methodological study of architectural, masking, objective, and sparsity design choices beneficial for robust neuroimaging multimodal representation learning. Neuro-JEPA was pretrained on 1,551,862 scans from 428,647 studies after modality-specific preprocessing with data curation across three core structural brain MRI sequences. We evaluated the learned representations across clinical and research settings, including 25 tasks from three health systems: NYU Langone, NYU Long Island, and Massachusetts General Hospital, and 22 tasks from 12 public datasets, covering unimodal, multimodal and cross-domain evaluation configurations. Across these benchmarks, existing neuroimaging foundation models showed inconsistent gains over a simple convolutional neural network (CNN) baseline, whereas Neuro-JEPA achieved stronger and more consistent performance across all evaluated settings. These results establish a scalable methodological framework for multimodal neuroimaging representation learning and highlight the need for foundation model evaluation protocols that include simple baselines, clinically heterogeneous cohorts and controlled multimodal comparisons.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CD-RCM: Generalizable Continuous-Depth Novel View Synthesis for Reflectance Confocal Microscopy

Reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) provides noninvasive, cellular-resolution "optical biopsies" of human skin in vivo by acquiring en-face images at successive depths, forming a sparse z-stack. Due to optical limitations, these stacks are anisotropic 3D volumes with lateral resolution (0.5 $\mu$m) $\sim$6 times higher compared to axial resolution, which is defined by the optical sectioning (3 $\mu$m), limiting the interpretation of tissue. Our goal is to provide continuous-depth visualization by interpolating intermediate sections and making the 3D volume isotropic. Such a representation permits arbitrary-direction sectioning, including histopathology-like cross-sectional examination, without requiring per-patient optimization. To that end, we introduce the first RCM-specific novel-view synthesis (NVS) approach, CD-RCM, a feedforward model that predicts realistic, unseen depths from sparsely sampled RCM stacks. Classical neural rendering methods focus on reconstruction from surface-level multi-view observations. In contrast to surface-level camera views, RCM can acquire optically sectioned en-face images of tissue beyond the surface up to 200 $\mu$m. However, during visualization of the RCM stacks, observations of the shallower sections (towards the surface) obscure the deeper ones. This unique axial imaging geometry and layer-dependent anatomical organization motivated our development of a tailored architectural and training framework that explicitly accounts for RCM's depth-resolved, occlusive imaging physics. Experiments demonstrate that CD-RCM achieves high-fidelity novel-view synthesis with sub-second inference time.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Optimism Stabilizes Thompson Sampling for Adaptive Inference

arXiv:2602.06014v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used for stochastic multi-armed bandits, yet its inferential properties under adaptive data collection are subtle. Classical asymptotic theory for sample means can fail because arm-specific sample sizes are random and coupled with the rewards through the action-selection rule. We study adaptive inference for Thompson sampling with Gaussian randomized indices in $K$-armed stochastic bandits with independent sub-Gaussian reward noises, and identify optimism as a key mechanism for restoring stability, meaning that each arm's pull count concentrates around a deterministic scale. This stability yields asymptotically valid Wald inference despite adaptive sampling. First, we prove that variance-inflated TS is stable for any $K \ge 2$, including the challenging regime where multiple arms are optimal, with asymptotically uniform allocation over optimal arms and sharp logarithmic pull-count asymptotics for suboptimal arms. This resolves the $K$-armed extension question raised by \citet{halder2025stable}, using new winner-map and Lyapunov-drift techniques to control allocation among multiple optimal arms. Second, we analyze an alternative optimistic modification that keeps the Gaussian index variance unchanged but adds an explicit mean bonus to the index center, and establish a similar stability conclusion. In summary, suitably implemented optimism stabilizes Thompson sampling and enables asymptotically valid Wald inference in multi-armed bandits, while incurring only a mild additional regret cost.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

Beyond phylogeny: Genome-wide DNA sequence patterns suggest DNA physical properties associated with thermal adaptation in extremophile microbes

Temperature is a fundamental constraint on biological systems, yet how it is reflected in genome sequence organization remains unclear. Here, we show that genome-wide distributions of short DNA sequences contain a robust signal of thermal adaptation that is largely independent of phylogeny. Using Structural Topic Modelling (STM), a machine-learning approach for identifying groups of co-occurring sequence motifs, we analyze canonical 6-mer and 9-mer frequency profiles of bacterial and archaeal genome proxies (randomly sampled genomic regions) and identify motif families systematically associated with thermophiles and psychrophiles. In bacterial thermophiles, the identified motif families are dominated by highly specific, overrepresented and co-occurring C- and G-stacked hexamers, and a distinct family of CG-periodic hexamers recurring across multiple temperature comparisons. In contrast, bacterial psychrophile-associated motifs are dominated by low-complexity A-, T-, and AT-run hexamers. Thermophilic archaea generally exhibit a distinct CTAG-centred hexamer family, suggesting that different domains may adapt to similar environmental constraints through different sequence-level solutions. However, this domain-level contrast is not absolute: in a targeted analysis of two thermophilic bacterium–archaeon pairs, we find unusually similar frequencies of all the STM-identified thermophile-associated hexamer families, suggesting that shared high-temperature environments can, in specific cases, partially override phylogenetic divergence. Notably, the identified motif families constitute only a small and highly selective subset of the vast space of possible G+C-rich or A+T-rich sequences. This indicates that thermal adaptation is associated with specific sequence architectures rather than broad shifts in nucleotide composition. Accordingly, the observed signal cannot be explained by overall base composition alone, but instead arises from structured combinations and positional arrangements of nucleotides within short sequence contexts. Related motif families are recovered at both k=6 and k=9, indicating that the signal reflects systematic shifts in genome-wide sequence organization rather than isolated sequence motifs. These patterns are consistent with known sequence-dependent DNA physical properties documented in biochemical and biophysical studies, including differences in base-stacking interactions and conformational flexibility. Together, our results suggest that genome-wide sequence organization reflects sequence-dependent DNA physical properties associated with thermal adaptation, revealing a previously underappreciated physical layer of genomic information beyond phylogenetic history.

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

Neural Additive and Basis Models with Feature Selection and Interactions

arXiv:2606.19850v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit attractive performance in various fields but often suffer from low interpretability. The neural additive model (NAM) and its variant called the neural basis model (NBM) use neural networks (NNs) as nonlinear shape functions in generalized additive models (GAMs). Both models are highly interpretable and exhibit good performance and flexibility for NN training. NAM and NBM can provide and visualize the contribution of each feature to the prediction owing to GAM-based architectures. However, when using two-input NNs to consider feature interactions or when applying them to high-dimensional datasets, training NAM and NBM becomes intractable due to the increase in the computational resources required. This paper proposes incorporating the feature selection mechanism into NAM and NBM to resolve computational bottlenecks. We introduce the feature selection layer in both models and update the selection weights during training. Our method is simple and can reduce computational costs and model sizes compared to vanilla NAM and NBM. In addition, it enables us to use two-input NNs even in high-dimensional datasets and capture feature interactions. We demonstrate that the proposed models are computationally efficient compared to vanilla NAM and NBM, and they exhibit better or comparable performance with state-of-the-art GAMs.

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

Where Did It Go Wrong? Process-Level Evaluation of Web Agents with Semantic State Tracking

arXiv:2606.15673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web agents act through long interaction sequences, yet existing benchmarks evaluate only terminal success, discarding all process information and offering little guidance on improvement. In this work, we conduct a process-level analysis of web agents. We introduce WebStep, a benchmark of 1,800 task instances with controlled difficulty and automatic semantic state tracking. Each website exposes a deterministic semantic MDP alongside the GUI: the agent operates on the interface, while the environment records high-level states and transitions in the background, enabling fine-grained analysis without manual annotation. Based on the semantic trajectory, we first show that process metrics reveal differences invisible to outcome evaluation: three agents whose success rates cluster within 31-33% diverge in exploration reach versus execution accuracy. Then, decomposing by skill characterizes the nature of these differences, exposing opposite per-skill rankings hidden within the same website: e.g., on Housing, OpenAI CUA outperforms Qwen3.5 by 23.7% on commit actions yet underperforms it by 15.6% on filtering, pinpointing a concrete skill to improve even within a domain. Bifurcation analysis further localizes the decisive error that loses the task and shows that this error is agent-specific rather than shared. Finally, these differences widen as tasks grow harder: success rate is similar on easy tasks but separates sharply as exploration becomes more demanding. Our process-level analysis opens a new avenue in web agent evaluation, providing fine-grained and actionable insight into where and how each agent should be improved.

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

AP-GRPO: Anchor-Gated Phonetic Alignment with Policy Optimization for Pathological Speech Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.15540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pathological speech from patients with neurodegenerative and neuromotor disorders is often acoustically distorted and linguistically fragmented, making pathological speech reconstruction necessary to recover intended textual content from distorted and incomplete speech recordings. Crucially, such recordings are rarely uniformly degraded: some words or short phrases remain reliable and can serve as audible anchors for reconstructing the corrupted surrounding content. We introduce Anchor-gated Phonetic Group Relative Policy Optimization (AP-GRPO), a GRPO framework with phonetic reward that aligns speech language models (SLMs) through audible-anchor preservation and inter-anchor phonetic compatibility to the original speech signal. AP-GRPO consists of: (i) an anchor-gated reward that matches reliable audible anchors in clear regions; and (ii) an inter-anchor phonetic alignment reward that evaluates whether recovered contents are phonetically supported by the corresponding corrupted inter-anchor speech span. Across four disease conditions, AP-GRPO improves faithful speech reconstruction, and the learned anchor constraint automatically adapts to each condition and thus reveals interpretable disease-specific profiles: conditions with severe articulatory degradation require stronger anchor enforcement, whereas milder impairment or linguistically impaired conditions rely more on phonetic alignment for inter-anchor recovery.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PCBSchemaGen: Reward-Guided LLM Code Synthesis for Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) Schematic Design with Structured Verification

arXiv:2602.00510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most LLM code-synthesis benchmarks rely on unit tests as the reward oracle, but PCB schematic design has none: correctness is defined by structured physical constraints over real IC packages and pin-level assignments, per-task golden references are unavailable, and SPICE simulation does not validate schematic-level correctness. We introduce PCBSchemaGen, a training-free inference-time framework that turns a frozen LLM into a verifiable, repairable PCB schematic generator. The framework induces a domain schema from IC datasheets to ground LLM decoding, pairs it with a deterministic 5-layer continuous-reward verifier with pin-level error localization, and refines candidates through a Thompson Sampling arm-acquiring bandit. We evaluate on 2 PCB benchmarks covering 227 real-IC tasks across 22 unified circuit domains, including a public-schematic-derived suite that serves as a fully held-out generalization test (verifier, KG library, and prompts frozen before any evaluation). Under our framework, an open-weight 31B model (Gemma-4-31B) passes 81.3% of PCBBench tasks on average, and the same framework transfers across both benchmarks with zero verifier code changes; a Circuitron-style inference-time prompting baseline on the same Gemma-4-31B backbone collapses on hard system-level designs. This suggests inference-time refinement under a deterministic structural verifier is a general recipe for reference-free LLM code synthesis in domains without unit-test oracles. Our benchmarks and deterministic verifier are publicly available at https://github.com/HZou9/PCBSchemaGen_v2.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimal Toffoli-Depth Multi-Controlled Toffoli Decomposition in 2D Qubit Layout

arXiv:2606.15113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The multi-controlled Toffoli (MCT) gate is a key primitive in quantum arithmetic, oracle construction, and quantum cryptanalysis. Although recent work has established optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions under all-to-all qubit connectivity, their realization on near-term quantum hardware with restricted qubit connectivity remains largely unexplored. While general-purpose quantum mappers can route arbitrary circuits, they do not explicitly exploit the repeated interaction patterns inherent in MCT decompositions. In our present paper, we study architecture-aware mappings of optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions onto restricted two-dimensional qubit layouts. We begin with a structured geometric placements that preserve the parallelism of state-of-the-art Toffoli and MCT decompositions with no additional depth overhead. We further introduce a motif-based packing framework in which decomposition layers are represented by interaction motifs derived from basic Toffoli gates. By embedding these motifs vertex-disjointly into hardware graphs, we characterize the minimum-size topologies supporting the required qubit resources and derive explicit bounds on the resulting depth overhead under tight qubit budgets. Finally, we compare these bounds with routing-aware placement heuristics and empirically evaluate the effectiveness of embedding different motifs across a range of hardware topologies.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

From Parameters to Feature Space: Task Arithmetic for Backdoor Mitigation in Model Merging

arXiv:2606.12498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging (MM) has gained significant attention as a cost-effective approach to integrate multiple task-specific models into a unified model. However, recent work reveals that MM is highly susceptible to backdoor attacks. Existing defenses based on task arithmetic often fail to eliminate backdoors without substantially degrading clean-task performance, owing to their reliance on direct parameter-space editing. To address this gap, we propose Linear Feature Path Minimization (LFPM), a backdoor mitigation framework for model merging, which introduces an anti-backdoor task vector into the backdoored merged model. Unlike prior approaches, LFPM formulates the backdoor robustness of the merged model from a unified feature-space perspective under the Cross-Task Linearity (CTL) framework, which leverages the approximate linearity of features across tasks. This perspective guides the optimization of the anti-backdoor task to suppress backdoors while preserving clean-task performance. Furthermore, we introduce an effective optimization mechanism based on gradient accumulation and loss path-integral, ensuring robust backdoor suppression along the interpolation path. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LFPM consistently exhibits strong robustness against backdoor attacks in both full fine-tuning and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) settings.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Nonadiabatic Self-Healing of Trotter Errors in Digitized Counterdiabatic Dynamics

arXiv:2512.22636v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trotter errors in digitized quantum dynamics arise from approximating time-ordered evolution under noncommuting Hamiltonian terms with a product formula. In the adiabatic regime, such errors are known to exhibit long-time self-healing [Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 060602 (2023)], where discretization effects are effectively suppressed. Here we show that self-healing persists at finite evolution times once nonadiabatic errors induced by finite-speed ramps are compensated. Using counterdiabatic driving to cancel diabatic transitions and isolate discretization effects, we study both noninteracting and interacting spin models and characterize the finite-time scaling with the Trotter steps and the total evolution time. In the instantaneous eigenbasis of the driven Hamiltonian, the leading digital error maps to an effective harmonic perturbation whose dominant Fourier component yields an analytic upper bound on the finite-time Trotter error and reveals the phase-cancellation mechanism underlying self-healing. Our results establish finite-time self-healing as a generic feature of digitized counterdiabatic protocols, clarify its mechanism beyond the long-time adiabatic limit, and provide practical guidance for high-fidelity state preparation on gate-based quantum processors.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Generative Artificial Intelligence in Psychotherapy Practice: A Global Online Survey of Mental Health Professionals' Adoption

Background: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, including large language model (LLM)-based platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, are being adopted across healthcare settings with increasing speed. Despite the increasing popularity of GenAI, empirical data on the extent and nature of adoption by mental health clinicians in routine psychotherapy practice globally remain scarce. Objective: This study aimed to characterize current use patterns of GenAI tools among a global sample of practicing mental health professionals, including prevalence of use, specific tools employed, clinical and administrative purposes served, perceived effect on workload, and the institutional context shaping adoption (e.g., encouragement, prohibition, and training). Methods: We administered a cross-sectional online survey to a global convenience sample of licensed mental health professionals who provide psychotherapy as part of the scope of their practice (i.e., psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors, nurses, and psychiatrists). Participants were recruited via professional networks, purposely avoiding the use of social media platforms. Within the survey, we captured GenAI use behaviors in psychotherapy contexts, and demographic and professional background data. Descriptive statistics were analyzed for all variables. Multivariate logistic regression was used to examine demographic and professional predictors of GenAI use. Results: A total of 766 mental health professionals who provide psychotherapy from 30 countries completed the survey. Of these, 54.6% (n=418) reported having purposely used at least one GenAI tool in psychotherapy clinical practice. ChatGPT was the most frequently used tool (354/418, 84.7%). The most commonly reported clinical purpose was assisting with treatment planning (175/418, 41.9%), followed by managing administrative tasks (173/418, 41.4%) and generating psychoeducational materials for clients (166/418, 39.7%). 82.8% of AI users reported that these tools reduced their overall work burden. Only 18.1% (139/766) of respondents reported institutional encouragement to use AI tools, while 81.1% (621/766) reported not having received any professional training on AI use. Predictors of AI adoption included younger age and rural practice setting. Conclusions: In this global convenience sample survey, GenAI use among mental health professionals in psychotherapy settings is widespread, concentrated in a wide variety of clinical and administrative tasks. Formal training and institutional guidance substantially lag behind current adoption patterns. These findings highlight an urgent need for evidence-based competency frameworks, regulatory clarity, and professional education to support safe and ethically informed integration of AI into clinical mental health practice.