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.

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Finite-Dimensional Type I von Neumann Algebras in PyTorch: A GPU-Accelerated Framework for Random Block-Diagonal Operators

arXiv:2606.15882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present \texttt{torch\_vn\_algebra}, an open-source Python library built on PyTorch for numerical experiments with finite-dimensional Type I von Neumann algebras (direct sums of matrix algebras). The library provides: $\bullet$ a compact batched tensor representation $(B,C,k_{\max},k_{\max})$ that handles both Monte Carlo samples and multiple direct summands; $\bullet$ lazy evaluation of operators to avoid unnecessary memory allocation; $\bullet$ generation of random operators with arbitrary eigenvalue distributions (user-provided samplers) and various unitary ensembles (Haar, $\mathrm{SU}(n)$, COE, CSE, diagonal phases); $\bullet$ functional calculus via SVD (absolute value, square root, inverse, entropy) and a hybrid method for extreme eigenvalues (exact diagonalisation for $k_{\max}\le256$, otherwise power iteration); $\bullet$ three trace functionals (blunt, normalised subspace trace, and the von Neumann tracial state); $\bullet$ GPU-accelerated batched linear algebra for moderate-scale Monte Carlo studies (e.g., $2\times10^4$ samples of $100\times100$ operators). The library is validated against analytical expectations (Haar moments, trace properties). Performance benchmarks on a Tesla P100 GPU are presented and discussed. Limitations and future work are outlined. The code is open-source.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606.08881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored. We present a standardized real-world benchmark for evaluating representative VLA and imitation learning policies on the low-cost SO-101 robotic platform. The benchmark comprises four representative manipulation tasks together with unified evaluation protocols, enabling systematic comparison under embodiment uncertainty. Using real-world teleoperated demonstrations, we fine-tune and evaluate $\pi_{0.5}$, SmolVLA, Wall-X, and ACT directly on the physical platform. Beyond conventional task success rates, the benchmark incorporates a structured failure taxonomy, semantic- and execution-level failure decomposition, and recovery-aware evaluation metrics to characterize policy robustness. Experimental results show that stronger pretrained VLA policies generally outperform the imitation learning baseline, although performance remains highly task-dependent under low-cost robotic deployment conditions. Execution instability emerges as the dominant failure source, while recovery capability varies substantially across architectures. These results highlight the importance of failure and recovery analysis beyond binary task success and establish SO-101 as a practical benchmark for evaluating embodied AI systems under realistic low-cost robotic deployment conditions.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

HierSVA: A Data Synthesis Pipeline, Dataset, and Benchmark for LLM-Driven Hierarchical Hardware Formal Verification

arXiv:2606.13706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present HierSVA, an integrated suite that combines a pipeline, dataset, and benchmark for LLM-driven hierarchical hardware formal verification. HierSVA-SP pairs an RTL preprocessing toolchain with an LLM-in-the-loop formal verification flow to produce reference SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA) on hierarchical RTL. Applying it to BaseJump STL yields HierSVA-DS, a dataset of 342 modules, with hierarchy metadata and depths 0–9, accompanied by a deep subset of 28 module-bug pairs with natural-language specifications and bug variants. HierSVA-B decomposes assertion quality into six metric axes: syntax correctness, assertion proof success rate, vacuity, specification faithfulness, mutation coverage, and formal core coverage. Applying HierSVA-B to twelve recent LLMs reveals three findings. First, the module-level compile rate is 67.1\%; among generated assertions in evaluable runs, 82.1\% prove non-vacuously, but the corresponding assertion sets detect only 70.2\% of eligible injected faults and cover 36.2\% of the formal core. Second, on 211 evaluable model–module entries in the deep subset, assertion sets flag buggy RTL with 0.87 recall, but 40\% of predicted-buggy outcomes are false positives on correct RTL, limiting precision to 0.60. Third, agentic mode improves S1-style provability and strength metrics, but gains plateau and oscillate. Codes and artifacts are available at \href{https://github.com/HierSVAAnon/HierSVACodeAndArtifacts}{https://github.com/HierSVAAnon/HierSVACodeAndArtifacts}. Dataset is available at \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/AnonymousHierSVA/HierSVA}{https://huggingface.co/datasets/AnonymousHierSVA/HierSVA}.

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

Gefen: Optimized Stochastic Optimizer

AdamW is a default optimizer for modern deep learning, but its first and second moment states add roughly two parameter-sized buffers to training memory. We propose Gefen, a memory-efficient optimizer that automatically shares second-moment estimates across parameter blocks and quantizes the first moment using a learned codebook, thereby reducing AdamW's memory footprint by ~8x while maintaining the same performance, corresponding to a reduction of 6.5 GiB per billion parameters. The method is motivated by a theoretical result showing that large mixed Hessian entries constrain the ratio of squared gradients toward one, suggesting that Hessian-aligned parameters are natural candidates for sharing second-moment statistics. Since computing Hessians is impractical at scale, Gefen infers block structure from the initial squared gradients, requiring no architecture-specific metadata or hyperparameters beyond AdamW defaults. Gefen learns an exact histogram-based dynamic-programming quantization codebook and reuses the same blocks for first-moment scaling. Across diverse experiments, Gefen achieves the lowest peak optimizer memory among the compared AdamW-like methods while maintaining AdamW-level performance. In FSDP and DDP training, the reduced memory footprint enables larger microbatches and improves throughput significantly over AdamW, providing a practical drop-in replacement with lower memory usage that can increase throughput and enable training larger models or using larger batch sizes. We provide the complete Python implementation, including fused CUDA kernels at https://github.com/ndvbd/Gefen

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

GateMem: Benchmarking Memory Governance in Multi-Principal Shared-Memory Agents

Memory benchmarks for LLM agents largely assume single-user settings, leaving shared assistants for hospitals, workplaces, campuses, and households understudied. In these deployments, multiple principals write to a common memory pool and query it under different roles, scopes, and relationships, so memory quality requires governance as well as recall. We introduce GateMem, a benchmark for multi-principal shared-memory agents. GateMem jointly evaluates utility for legitimate long-horizon requests with state updates, access control across contextual authorization boundaries, and agent-facing active forgetting after explicit deletion requests. It spans medical, office, education, and household domains, with long-form multi-party episodes, incremental memory injection, hidden checkpoints, structured judging, and leak-target annotations. Across diverse baselines and backbone models, no method simultaneously achieves strong utility, robust access control, and reliable forgetting. Long-context prompting often yields the best governance score at high token cost, while retrieval-based and external-memory methods reduce cost yet still leak unauthorized or deleted information. These results show current memory agents remain far from reliable shared institutional deployment.

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

Learning universal approximations for partial differential equations with Physics-Informed Broad Learning System

arXiv:2606.19754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Partial differential equations (PDEs) play a central role in modeling complex physical, biological, and engineering systems. While traditional numerical solvers are robust, they often incur prohibitive computational costs due to mesh dependencies, whereas recent Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but frequently suffer from slow convergence and optimization instability. To bridge this gap, this article proposes the Physics-Informed Broad Learning System (PIBLS), a novel backpropagation-free framework that reformulates PDE solving as a direct least-squares optimization. We improved an algorithm within this framework to handle nonlinear PDEs efficiently and provide a rigorous mathematical proof establishing the universal approximation property of PIBLS for these equations. Experiments on linear and nonlinear PDEs demonstrate that PIBLS is one to three orders of magnitude faster than conventional PINNs while achieving significantly higher solution accuracy. This framework provides a computationally efficient paradigm for scientific machine learning, offering a practical, high-speed alternative for real-time simulation and design optimization tasks.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

EIBench: A Simulator-Based Benchmark and Turn-Credit RL for Emotion Management

Emotional intelligence (EI) in Large Language Models (LLMs) is often evaluated through static understanding tasks or single-response dialogue generation. However, emotion management is interactive: a good model should not only recognize a user's emotion, but also improve the user's emotional and relational state over several turns. We introduce EIBench, a simulator-based benchmark for interactive emotion management. EIBench contains 2,222 scenarios, with 2,009 for training and 213 for held-out testing. The scenarios are organized by a 2x2 taxonomy covering Support, Defense, Repair, and Charm, which together capture different forms of support, boundary maintenance, trust repair, and rapport building. In each scenario, an LLM simulator plays the user, updates an emotion-relation state after each turn, and maps the final state to an anchor-based score. This design makes EIBench both an evaluation benchmark and a training environment: the final state gives the outcome reward, while the per-turn state updates provide dense feedback for RL. We evaluate 15 open- and closed-source LLMs. Current models perform well on support and rapport-building scenes, but struggle with boundary maintenance under user pressure. To improve the EI ability of LLMs, we propose Centered Turn-Credit GRPO (CTC-GRPO), a GRPO extension that reuses the simulator's per-turn state updates as dense turn-level feedback while preserving the final outcome reward. CTC-GRPO improves Qwen3-8B from -22.4 to +22.4 on EIBench and also improves on out-of-distribution evaluations including SAGE (+12.4) and EQBench3 (+20.9%). Our results show that simulator-tracked user states can support both evaluation and training for multi-turn emotion management.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Asymptotically Optimal Sequential Testing with Markovian Data

arXiv:2602.17587v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study one-sided and $\alpha$-correct sequential hypothesis testing for data generated by an ergodic, finite-state Markov chain. The null hypothesis is that the unknown transition matrix belongs to a prescribed set $P$ of stochastic matrices, and the alternative corresponds to a disjoint set $Q$. We establish a non-asymptotic instance-dependent lower bound on the expected stopping time of any valid sequential test under the alternative, which is asymptotically tight. Our novel analysis improves the existing lower bounds, which are either asymptotic or provably sub-optimal in this setting. Our lower bound incorporates both the stationary distribution and the transition structure induced by the unknown Markov chain. We further propose an optimal test whose expected stopping time matches this lower bound asymptotically as $\alpha \to 0$. We illustrate the usefulness of our framework through applications to sequential detection of model misspecification in Markov Chain Monte Carlo and to testing structural properties, such as the linearity of transition dynamics, in Markov decision processes. Our findings yield a sharp and general characterization of optimal sequential testing procedures under Markovian dependence.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

"Did you lie?" Evaluating Lie Detectors across Model Scale and Belief-Verified Model Organisms

arXiv:2606.12618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust lie detectors for language models could enable powerful techniques for auditing, monitoring, and post-hoc investigation of model behaviour, but evaluating them requires testbeds where models verifiably believe the opposite of what they say. We show that existing trained model organisms often fail this requirement, leaving prior positive and negative detection results difficult to interpret. We address this with 13 reasoning model organisms whose hidden beliefs are verified in chain-of-thought and shown to generalise to held-out tasks, alongside Varied Deception, a prompted-lying testbed covering a broad range of lie-inducing motivations. On these testbeds we evaluate four detectors: a chain-of-thought judge, a logprob classifier, and two activation probes, including Did-You-Lie (DYL), a new method for training follow-up probes. On prompted lying, across 31 open-weight models spanning 2B to 1T parameters, all four detectors show positive scaling with model capability. However, every activation- and logprob-based detector drops sharply on our trained model organisms, with DYL retaining the most signal; only the chain-of-thought judge remains strong, with 0.82 balanced accuracy, partly as an artefact of our verification process favouring CoT-readable beliefs. Current lie detectors therefore cannot support high-confidence claims about model beliefs, and we suggest research directions that may address some of their current limitations. We release our datasets, model organisms, and trained detectors.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

SuperThoughts: Reasoning Tokens in Superposition

Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves LLM problem-solving but is computationally expensive due to sequential token generation. While recent works explore reasoning in continuous latent spaces to bypass discrete token generation, they often struggle with training stability and fail to scale to complex, long-horizon tasks due to lack of supervision signal. We propose SuperThoughts, which compresses pairs of consecutive CoT tokens into single latent representations and decodes two tokens per step via a lightweight Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) module. This preserves discrete token supervision at training time while doubling throughput at inference time. We finetune Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-14B-Instruct, and evaluate on MATH500, AMC, OlympiadBench, and GPQA-Diamond. With a confidence-based adaptive mechanism that falls back to standard decoding when uncertain, SuperThoughts achieves $\sim$20–30\% CoT length reduction while maintaining accuracy with minimal degradation (1-2 points accuracy drop on most tasks).

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Cardio Heart Connect: Protocol for a Randomized Trial of a Commercially Available mHealth Fitness Intervention for Cardiac Rehabilitation After Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement

Background: Despite ample evidence of the benefits of cardiac rehabilitation (CR), few transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) patients participate. Commercially available mobile health offers an opportunity to deliver activity-promotion content to populations that are challenged to participate in CR. This study aims to test the efficacy of clinically controlled, commercially available fitness programming for improving physical activity and cardiovascular health outcomes designed to be initiated while patients are on waitlists for traditional CR. Methods: The Cardio Heart Connect study is a hybrid type I effectiveness-implementation trial aiming to enroll N=200 patients who have been placed on a cardiac rehab waitlist following a TAVR procedure from the University of Colorado Hospital Heart and Vascular Center. Participants will be randomized 1:1 to the Cardio Heart Connect intervention with commercially available fitness or attention control, designed to control for technology access. At baseline, post-intervention (8 weeks), and follow-up (12 months), we will assess the primary outcome of participants? daily steps as measured by smartwatch accelerometer and secondary outcomes of interest including functional capacity (Duke Activity Status Index; VO2max), quality of life (Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire), and cardiovascular health status (Life Essential 8). In addition, we will use mixed methodologies to evaluate the implementation of intervention using the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance (RE-AIM) Framework. Conclusions: Commercially available fitness programs have the potential to provide more accessible opportunities for patients recovering from TAVR to engage in physical activity and may be preferred due to their customizability, convenience, and ease of scheduling. Overall, this study will provide insight into the use of commercial mHealth to promote activity following TAVR.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Automated Airways Characterization and Assessment of Cystic Fibrosis from CT Imaging

Background Advancements in medical imaging have enabled non-invasive diagnosis and staging of cystic fibrosis (CF) using CT scans, revealing dilated airways, an increased number of visible airways, and airway generation splits in these patients. However, manual characterization of airways remains time-consuming and challenging due to the numerous structural changes, thereby limiting clinical feasibility. This study aims to develop an automated algorithm to characterize airways from segmented lung CT scans and apply this to a retrospective population. This approach reduces the time required to analyze images and obtain disease-staging results. Methods This framework consists of two stages. The first stage extracts and skeletonizes the airway tree from lung CTs, while the second stage measures lung features, including airway volumes, branch counts, generation splits, diameters, and cross-sectional areas. This permits comprehensive characterization for use in clinical assessment. Results The airways analysis was performed on 169 CT volumes ranging in age from 6 to 18 years of age, revealing substantial differences in detected airway branches, generation splits, and normalized airway volume between the control and CF groups. The framework also measures airway diameters and cross-sectional areas, revealing an increase in the number of small airways in cystic fibrosis patients, due to early bronchiectasis. These findings align with previous research and demonstrate the framework's ability to accurately quantify airway changes in patients with CF. Discussion The framework extracts entire airway trees, facilitating measurements of volume, branch count, diameters, and cross-sectional areas, which change with CF severity and/or treatment. However, partial lung atelectasis can limit the accuracy of airway detection in moderate-to-severe cases. Funding NIA U54 AG054345 and NIA R21 AG07857501

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

Divide-and-Denoise: A Game-Theoretic Method for Fairly Composing Diffusion Models

The abundance of pre-trained diffusion models provides an opportunity for composition. Combining several models, however, runs the risk of one model dominating or models disagreeing with each other. Here, we propose Divide-and-Denoise, a method for coordinating multiple pre-trained diffusion models during sampling. Much like managing a specialized workforce, our method creates a fair but efficient division of labor across models. Central to our method is the notion of an allocation which defines the responsibility of each model to every region of the noisy sample. At every timestep, we then denoise by (i) updating the allocation by solving a fair division game, where we divide the sample into regions that maximize total utility under fairness constraints, and (ii) aligning the models with this allocation, where we guide each model to denoise within its assigned region. This leads to a new composite denoising process that evolves in tandem with a division process. We evaluate Divide-and-Denoise on conditional image generation. Across several quality metrics, including the GenEval benchmark, our method outperforms baselines and resolves common failures including missing objects and mismatched attributes. Experiments show that Divide-and-Denoise utilizes each model's expertise without neglecting any other model.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Estimating the effectiveness of syndromic screening at airports for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease

Authors:

We used a stochastic simulation model to estimate the effectiveness of combined exit and entry airport screening for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease (BVD), using natural-history parameters from a Bayesian re-analysis of the 2012 Isiro outbreak. For a 12-hour international flight from DRC or Uganda at 86% screening sensitivity, we estimate 65% of infected travellers would arrive undetected (95% CrI: 38 - 76%). The main driver of this outcome is the relative duration of the the incubation period (approximately 7.7 days) and the onset-to-severe-disease interval (approximately 4 days): most infected travellers board before symptom onset and are undetectable by any syndromic screen, whilst those who are symptomatic progress rapidly to illness severe enough to preclude travel. This is compounded during active epidemic growth, when recently exposed (and therefore pre-symptomatic) cases are overrepresented among travellers. Syndromic airport screening offers limited protection against BVD spread via air travel, and should be complemented by outbreak control at source and strengthened clinical surveillance in receiving countries with high travel connectivity to affected areas.

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

FORT-Searcher: Synthesizing Shortcut-Resistant Search Tasks for Training Deep Search Agents

Training deep search agents requires verifiable questions whose answers remain unavailable until sufficient evidence has been acquired through search. Existing synthesis methods often increase apparent difficulty by enriching graph structures, but structural complexity alone does not guarantee realized search difficulty: the intended search process can collapse through a cheaper identifying route. We formalize this gap with a shortcut-aware difficulty framework and identify four actionable shortcut risks: evidence co-coverage, single-clue selectivity, exposed constants, and prior-knowledge binding. To diagnose their realized effects, we use trajectory signatures including solving cost, answer hit time, and prior-shortcut rate. Guided by this framework, we introduce FORT, a Framework of Shortcut-Resistant Training-Data Synthesis. FORT constructs shortcut-resistant training data by controlling shortcut risks across entity selection, evidence graph construction, question formulation, and adversarial refinement. Experiments show that FORT induces longer pre-answer search and fewer shortcut patterns than existing open-source deep search datasets. Using the resulting trajectories, we train FORT-Searcher with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) only, and it achieves the best overall performance among comparable-size open-source search agents on challenging deep search benchmarks. Relevant resources will be made available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/FORT-Searcher.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Perceptions of aging well among older adults with heart failure: insights from a qualitative study

Background: Heart failure (HF) is a prevalent and often debilitating cardiovascular condition among older adults, frequently accompanied by multimorbidity, functional limitations, and the need to age in place. Traditional models of successful aging emphasize disease absence and preserved function, yet most individuals with HF live with ongoing symptoms and chronic health challenges. How older adults with HF define aging well, particularly across different socioeconomic contexts, remains underexplored. Objectives: To explore how older adults with HF conceptualize aging well and to identify perceived facilitators and barriers across more and less resourced New York City neighborhoods. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 adults diagnosed with HF residing in Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods classified by 2019 United States Census data. Interviews were guided by Rowe and Kahn's model. Transcripts were analyzed using an inductive-deductive thematic approach and interpreted in alignment with the Healthy People 2030 framework. Results: Participants had a mean age of 69 years; 50% identified as Black and 50% were women. Despite functional limitations, 65% reported aging well. Five themes emerged: maintaining physical function, maintaining cognitive function, sustaining social relationships, avoiding pain, and promoting overall well-being. Avoiding pain and promoting well-being extended beyond traditional models. Neighborhood context shaped priorities, with financial stability emphasized in more affluent areas and social cohesion prioritized in less affluent communities. Conclusions: Older adults with HF frequently perceive themselves as aging well despite chronic illness, reframing successful aging beyond disease avoidance. These findings support a patient-centered, place-informed model of aging well with implications for healthcare delivery and policy.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

No One-Size-Fits-All Neurons: Task-based Neurons for Artificial Neural Networks

arXiv:2405.02369v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the past decade, many successful networks are on novel architectures, which almost exclusively use the same type of neurons. Recently, more and more deep learning studies have been inspired by the idea of NeuroAI and the neuronal diversity observed in human brains, leading to the proposal of novel artificial neuron designs. Designing well-performing neurons represents a new dimension relative to designing well-performing neural architectures. Biologically, the brain does not rely on a single type of neuron that universally functions in all aspects. Instead, in our brain, neurons are often task-based. In this study, we address the following question: since the human brain is a task-based neuron user, can the artificial network design go from the task-based architecture design to the task-based neuron design? Since methodologically there are no one-size-fits-all neurons, given the same structure, task-based neurons can enhance the feature representation ability relative to the existing universal neurons due to the intrinsic inductive bias for the task. Specifically, we propose a two-step framework for prototyping task-based neurons. As the initial step, we evaluate the proposed framework using polynomials as base functions. Empirically, systematic experimental results on synthetic data, classic benchmarks, and real-world applications show that the proposed task-based neuron design is not only feasible but also delivers competitive performance over other state-of-the-art models.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Systematic Construction of Time-Dependent Hamiltonians for Microwave-Driven Josephson Circuits

arXiv:2512.20743v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time-dependent electromagnetic drives are fundamental for controlling complex quantum systems, including superconducting Josephson circuits. In these devices, accurate time-dependent Hamiltonian models are imperative for predicting their dynamics and designing high-fidelity quantum operations. Existing numerical methods, such as black-box quantization (BBQ) and energy-participation ratio (EPR), excel at modeling the static Hamiltonians of Josephson circuits. However, these techniques do not fully capture the behavior of driven circuits stimulated by external microwave drives, nor do they include a generalized approach to account for the inevitable noise and dissipation that enter through microwave ports. Here, we introduce numerical techniques that leverage classical microwave simulations, efficiently executable in finite-element solvers, to obtain the time-dependent Hamiltonian of microwave-driven superconducting circuits with arbitrary geometries under charge, flux, or mixed electromagnetic modulation. Importantly, our techniques do not rely on a lumped-element description of the superconducting circuit, in contrast to previous approaches to tackling this problem. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by characterizing the driven properties of realistic circuit devices in complex electromagnetic environments, including coherent dynamics due to charge and flux modulation, as well as drive-induced relaxation and dephasing. Our techniques offer a powerful toolbox for optimizing circuit designs and advancing practical applications in superconducting quantum computing.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Superhuman Safe and Agile Racing through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.22748v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous systems have achieved superhuman performance in isolation or simulation, yet they remain brittle in shared, dynamic real-world spaces. This failure stems from the dominant single-agent paradigm for physical applications, where other actors are ignored or treated as environmental noise, preventing effective coordination. Here we show that multi-agent reinforcement learning provides the essential safety scaffolding required for real-world interaction. Using high-speed quadrotor racing as a high-stakes testbed, we train agents to navigate complex aerodynamic interactions and strategic maneuvering with a variable number of racers. Through league-based self-play, agents evolve sophisticated anticipatory behaviors, including proactive collision avoidance, overtaking, and handling multi-agent physical interactions, including aerodynamic downwash. Our agents outperform a champion-level human pilot in multi-player races at speeds exceeding 22 m/s, while simultaneously reducing collision rates by 50 % compared to state-of-the-art single-agent baselines. Crucially, training with diverse artificial agents enables zero-shot generalization to safer human interaction. These results suggest that the path to robust robotic co-existence lies not in isolated safety constraints, but in the rigorous demands of multi-agent interaction. Multimedia materials are available at: https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/marl

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

Relighting as a Probe of Visual Priors via Augmented Latent Intrinsics

Image-to-image relighting requires representations that separate illumination from scene properties while preserving dense geometry, material, and photometric cues. We use this task as a probe of visual priors: unlike recognition tasks that reward invariance, relighting tests whether visual features retain the information needed for light transfer. Through a controlled generative relighting framework, we find that strong semantic encoders can degrade relighting quality, exposing a semantic–photometric trade-off between abstraction and physical fidelity. We introduce Augmented Latent Intrinsics (ALI), which balances this trade-off by fusing dense, pixel-aligned visual features into a latent-intrinsic relighting model and refining it with self-supervision on unlabeled real image pairs. ALI improves relighting quality, especially on glossy, metallic, and transparent materials, and demonstrates that generative relighting is an effective tool for quantifying what visual encoders encode about the physical world.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Learning on a Razor's Edge: Identifiability and Singularity of Polynomial Neural Networks

arXiv:2505.11846v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study function spaces parametrized by neural networks, referred to as neuromanifolds. Specifically, we focus on deep Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with an activation function that is a sufficiently generic polynomial. First, we address the identifiability problem, showing that, for almost all functions in the neuromanifold of an MLP, there exist only finitely many parameter choices yielding that function. For CNNs, the parametrization is generically one-to-one. As a consequence, we compute the dimension of the neuromanifold. Second, we describe singular points of neuromanifolds. We characterize singularities completely for CNNs, and partially for MLPs. In both cases, they arise from sparse subnetworks. For MLPs, we prove that these singularities often correspond to critical points of the mean-squared error loss, which does not hold for CNNs. This provides a geometric explanation of the sparsity bias of MLPs. All of our results leverage tools from algebraic geometry.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MathVis-Fine: Aligning Visual Supervision with Necessity via Progressive Dependency-Guided Training for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.17888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has extended from purely linguistic domains to multimodal scenarios; however, existing approaches often treat visual inputs as homogeneous or auxiliary signals, failing to capture the intricate and sample-specific dependencies between text and images in mathematical problem-solving. This gives rise to two core issues: first, the supervisory signals for visual content are generalized and coarse-grained, lacking adaptation to the actual necessity of visual information in each sample; second, training feedback becomes inaccurate when visual rewards are uniformly applied without distinguishing the complementary relationships among inputs. These limitations hinder models from achieving precise multimodal reasoning. In this work, we propose a framework for modeling fine-grained visual dependencies in mathematical reasoning. We first construct the MathVis-Fine dataset, augmenting fine-grained visual annotations with visual dependency ratings. Building upon this dataset, we introduce a two-stage progressive visual enhancement training paradigm that balances answer correctness rewards and visual grounding rewards according to the intrinsic visual dependency level of each sample, thereby mitigating reward bias and improving supervision accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the MathVis-Fine framework effectively enhances visual perception progressively based on visual dependency, offering a more precise training framework for multimodal mathematical reasoning. We will release the dataset upon acceptance.

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

WeGenBench: A Multidimensional Diagnostic Benchmark towards Text-to-Image Model Optimization

Recent text-to-image generation models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in synthesizing highly realistic images from text inputs alone. Although existing benchmarks can evaluate the generation capabilities of various models to some extent, they struggle to comprehensively and accurately measure performance across multiple dimensions, often failing to reveal the inherent deficiencies of models in specific categories. To address these limitations, we propose WeGenBench, a novel benchmark designed for the comprehensive, multi-perspective evaluation of text-to-image generation capabilities. Our benchmark comprises a total of 4,000 test prompts across two primary categories, meticulously balanced between Chinese and English to evaluate bilingual and cross-cultural generation capabilities. Beyond macroscopic scene classification, we annotate each prompt with multi-dimensional tags tailored to the distinct content and challenges of each language, thereby refining the generation tasks into more specific sub-categories. Through a cross-dimensional evaluation mechanism leveraging both scene classifications and multi-dimensional tags, WeGenBench can precisely pinpoint model shortcomings in specific generation categories. Furthermore, to measure generation quality more accurately, we design and validate several novel evaluation metrics by integrating Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which assess model performance on domain-specific tasks from three core aspects. Crucially, our approach yields both the assessment outcomes and the detailed reasoning trajectories, facilitating a rigorous verification of the accuracy and soundness of the evaluation results. Finally, we conduct systematic benchmarking on current state-of-the-art methods and provide an in-depth analysis of the limitations present in existing models.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Semantic Grading of Written Answers in Low-Resource Language Bangla Using a Fine-Tuned Lightweight Language Model

Bangla is among the world's most widely spoken languages, yet it remains underserved in educational NLP research. In many remote and rural regions, access to qualified subject teachers is limited, and written answers are consequently graded largely by hand, restricting timely and consistent feedback. Automatic assessment is challenging because semantically correct responses can vary substantially in surface form. We present a bilingual (Bangla-English) evaluation system designed for low-resource educational settings that prioritizes semantic correctness over lexical overlap. Our approach fine-tunes a lightweight language model to grade each response using the question, reference answer, and student answer, producing a numeric score and concise, context-grounded feedback suitable for classroom deployment. We also construct a synthetic bilingual dataset to enable controlled training and evaluation. Across proprietary and open-source LLMs evaluated under a unified protocol, our QLoRA-tuned Qwen3-8B confirms consistent improvement by producing the most leakage-resistant feedback (RoRa = 0.819) in synthetic evaluation and the strongest agreement with human scores (rho = 0.936, MAE = 0.725) in a dedicated human study.