Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Pythagoras-Prover: Advancing Efficient Formal Proving via Augmented Lean Formalisation

arXiv:2606.12594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Lean theorem provers achieve strong performance only with substantial training and inference compute, driven in part by scarce verified proof data and the long reasoning traces of formal proof search, making both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and sampling expensive. We introduce Pythagoras-Prover, a compute-efficient open-source family of Lean theorem provers built for practical compute budgets. The family spans two generation paradigms: autoregressive models at 4B and 32B parameters, and a first proof-of-concept diffusion-based prover (4B) that iteratively refines Lean proofs at inference time. For training efficiency, we build a Lean-verified corpus stratified into easy, medium, and hard problems for curriculum SFT, so models acquire proof skills progressively from shorter, simpler proofs to longer, harder ones. During SFT, a dynamic proof-reasoning filtering scheme preserves informative proof traces while keeping each instance within an 8k-token context budget. We also introduce Augmented Lean Formalisation (ALF), which expands scarce verified corpora into variants of formal statements, populated via self-distillation for extra training signal without formally verifying every mutated instance. By perturbing known problems while preserving their formal character, ALF reduces reliance on any statement's surface form. Empirically, Pythagoras-Prover-4B surpasses DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B at pass@32 on MiniF2F-Test (86.1% vs 82.4%) with ~167x fewer parameters, while Pythagoras-Prover-32B sets the open-source state of the art at 93.0% on MiniF2F-Test and solves 93 of 672 PutnamBench problems. We release MiniF2F-ALF, an ALF-mutated contamination-sensitive benchmark on which every evaluated model loses accuracy; here our 32B remains strongest and our 4B matches the prior state of the art, Goedel-Prover-V2-32B.

02.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Post-adjuvant chemotherapy in ctDNA-positive patients with resected colorectal cancer: a randomized phase 3 trial

Tumor-informed circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) enables detection of molecular residual disease (MRD) after curative resection of colorectal cancer (CRC), but whether early intervention improves outcomes remains uncertain. ALTAIR was a randomized, double-blind, phase 3 trial embedded in the CIRCULATE-Japan platform evaluating a post-adjuvant ctDNA surveillance strategy with treatment initiation upon molecular recurrence. Patients with resected stage 0–IV CRC who became ctDNA positive after completion of standard-of-care therapy and had no radiological evidence of disease were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive trifluridine/tipiracil (FTD/TPI) or placebo for 6 months. The primary endpoint was investigator-assessed disease-free survival (DFS). Between July 2020 and June 2023, 243 patients were randomized to FTD/TPI (n = 122) or placebo (n = 121). Median DFS was 9.30 months with FTD/TPI and 5.55 months with placebo (hazard ratio = 0.79, 95% confidence interval: 0.60–1.05, P = 0.107), and the primary endpoint was not met. FTD/TPI increased grade 3 or higher hematologic adverse events (73.0% versus 3.3%) without new safety signals. These findings indicate that post-adjuvant intervention with FTD/TPI did not significantly improve DFS in ctDNA-positive patients without radiological disease. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04457297 . In the randomized, double-blind phase 3 ALTAIR trial, patients with resected colorectal cancer who became positive for circulating tumor DNA during post-adjuvant surveillance received trifluridine/tipiracil hydrochloride therapy, which did not significantly prolong disease-free survival compared with placebo.

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

Vernier: Probing Representational Misalignment Behind Lexical Gaps in Causal Reasoning

作者:

Instruction-tuned language models can answer the same causal-reasoning question differently after its English variable names are replaced by type-preserving placeholders, although the structural causal model and the gold answer are unchanged. We ask whether this lexical gap reflects information loss in the placeholder view or a misaligned read-out from a representation that still carries answer-relevant content. Vernier uses a paired-view weight update as an instrument and then inspects the mechanism left after the gap closes. In the working regimes, the evidence favours representational misalignment. A variable-name probe becomes more accurate on the placeholder view, and activation patching on Qwen-7B, Qwen-14B, and Llama-3.1-8B shows that the decision-token representation can transfer answer identity between views. The update that realigns the views is counterfactual augmentation over original and placeholder prompts, while the answer-subspace KL mainly sharpens intermediate answer-belief agreement. Success is bounded by model family, scale, and task. CRASS transfer is reliable across Qwen scales and Llama, e-CARE remains weak, and preliminary non-causal rename tasks show a similar qualitative pattern.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Super-Arrhenius relaxation of the triangular plaquette model in any dimension

arXiv:2606.16259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consider the following plaquette model from statistical physics: a lamp lies at every vertex of the triangular lattice and a switch lies at every even vertex of the (bipartite) dual hexagonal lattice. Each switch toggles the three lamps on its face. The energy of a configuration is the number of ON lamps. For the Glauber dynamics associated with the Gibbs measure defined by this Hamiltonian at any inverse temperature $\beta>0$, we show that, in any dimension $d\ge 2$, the infinite volume relaxation time satisfies \[e^{\beta^2/C}/C \le T_{\mathrm{rel}}\le Ce^{e^{C\beta}}\] for some $C>0$. Our result entails that the Gibbs measure is unique. The $e^{\beta^2}$ scaling was conjectured by Newman and Moore in 1999 and matches the behaviour of supercritical rooted kinetically constrained models such as the East model, thus recovering fragile glass phenomenology in the absence of kinetic constraints. More precisely, we show that, on a torus of side length $2^k$, when $\beta\to\infty$ and $k/\beta\to0$, we have $T_{\mathrm{rel}}=e^{2\beta k(1+o(1))}$. Quite surprisingly, however, we also prove that, on non-periodic finite domains of size $n\le e^{\beta/C}$ for large $C>0$, we have the much larger asymptotics $\ln T_{\mathrm{rel}}=\beta n^{\Theta(1)}$. The main ingredients of the proofs are new results in extremal and enumerative combinatorics and rely on renormalisation ideas for the dynamics and its groundstates also known as the Ledrappier subshift. We note consequences of our results to geometric group theory (more precisely to the complexity of the word problem for the Baumslag finitely presented group) and to ergodic theory.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Towards Conversational AI for Disease Management

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue1, their capabilities for effective management reasoning—including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription—remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE)1−3 through a new LLM-based agentic system optimized for multi-visit clinical management and dialogue. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini’s long-context capabilities4, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialists and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. Though AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE’s strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.

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

Agentic Electronic Design Automation: A Handoff Perspective

arXiv:2606.19795v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electronic design automation (EDA) is inherently multi-stage and handoff-heavy. Design artifacts, flow scripts, and engineering decisions cross tool, session, and organizational boundaries before final implementation, signoff, or release. Each transfer carries explicit and implicit requirements that may not be fully captured by stage-local checks. LLM-based agents now invoke EDA tools directly, embed retrieved knowledge in executable scripts, and hand off state across sessions and stages. Once their outputs condition downstream engineering decisions, the transferred object must satisfy a handoff contract and meet the assumptions of its next consumer. This survey introduces handoff validity as its organizing principle. A handoff is valid when the transferred object satisfies the consumer's acceptance conditions and carries sufficient context, evidence, and provenance for downstream use. We review 82 systems and classify them into three boundary classes. Stage-Bound systems establish validity within a single EDA stage or bounded verification task. Flow-Bound systems preserve coherent workflow state across tools, invocations, and sessions. Organization-Bound systems maintain source grounding, provenance, scope, and admissibility across knowledge and authority boundaries. For each class, we analyze handoff contracts, handoff objects, coordination mechanisms, and open questions. These analyses motivate a five-layer EDA agent communication protocol (EACP), covering the agent discovery, agent message, tool invocation, workflow orchestration, and security and IP protocols. We aim to provide a common vocabulary and research agenda for trustworthy agentic EDA.

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

"Is This Not Enough?": Asymmetries in Institutional Accountability and Collective Sensemaking in the Case of Canada's Algorithmic Visa Triage System

arXiv:2606.13071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines how algorithmic accountability in Canada's visa system is articulated institutionally and experienced by applicants across borders. We analyzed Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC)'s Algorithmic Impact Assessment (AIA) for the temporary resident visa (TRV) triage system using the algorithmic decision-making adapted for the public sector (ADMAPS) framework and analyzed Reddit discussions among applicants using a mixed-methods approach. We show that while institutional artifacts emphasize transparency, procedural safeguards, and bounded impacts, applicants engage in collective sensemaking to interpret opaque decisions, often relying on peer knowledge amid uncertainty. We identify three asymmetries between how institutional accountability is structured and how people perceive the process: epistemic asymmetry in access to decision logic, jurisdictional asymmetry in exposure shaped by geopolitical positioning, and temporal–relational asymmetry in how waiting and uncertainty are experienced. We emphasize why it is important to shift attention from institutional design to the uneven distribution of experiences with public-sector algorithmic governance. Together, these contributions demonstrate how algorithmic governance systems in the context of transnational migration produce structured asymmetries not captured by institutional disclosure frameworks, and how extending ADMAPS can account for those uneven translations of accountability.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

How Many Shots Are Enough for a Quantum Circuit?

arXiv:2606.16965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum algorithms require repeated circuit executions, known as shots, to estimate output distributions accurately. Determining the minimal number of shots needed to meet a target accuracy is crucial to reduce costs and resource usage, especially on today's noisy and expensive quantum hardware. In this paper, we address the shot optimisation problem in a black-box setting, where no assumptions are made about the structure of the quantum circuit or the noise model of the backend. We introduce IncrementalExecution, a novel online framework that dynamically determines when to stop executing shots based on the principle of point of diminishing returns: the point at which additional shots no longer significantly alter the empirical distribution of a fixed circuit. The framework supports customisable policies for shot management, enabling flexible trade-offs between execution cost and result fidelity within static execution scenarios. We assess our proposal through an extensive experimental evaluation spanning 33,750 framework configurations across 180 unique static quantum circuit-backend combinations, for a total of 7.3M independent experiments. Unlike prior work that relies on problem-specific knowledge or algorithm-dependent assumptions (e.g., variational or adaptive workflows), our approach is applicable to a large set of static circuits and immediately deployable on current quantum cloud platforms.

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

Explicit Context-Driven Neural Acoustic Modeling for High-Fidelity RIR Generation

arXiv:2509.15210v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Realistic sound simulation plays a critical role in many applications. A key element in sound simulation is the room impulse response (RIR), which characterizes how sound propagates within a given space. Recent studies have applied neural implicit methods to learn RIR using context information collected from the environment, such as scene images. However, these approaches do not effectively leverage explicit geometric information from the environment. To further exploit neural implicit models with direct geometric features, we present MiNAF, which queries a rough room mesh at given locations and extracts distance distributions as an explicit representation of local context. Our approach demonstrates that incorporating explicit local geometric features can better guide the model in generating more accurate RIR predictions. Through comparisons with conventional and state-of-the-art methods, we show that MiNAF performs competitively across various evaluation metrics.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

A Three-Tier Operational Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Hospital Medication Safety

Objective. To introduce PsiBench, a clinically validated medication-safety benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) against the standards used to certify hospital computerized provider order entry (CPOE) and electronic health record (EHR) systems, and a non-overlapping three-tier evaluation framework separating highest-stakes discrimination, the operational CDS regime, and category-correct alerting. Materials and Methods. PsiBench comprises 492 medication-safety scenarios across 11 safety categories, created by clinical pharmacology experts whose work underpins an annualized testing procedure used by more than 2,000 U.S. hospitals. The three-tier framework partitions the scenarios non-overlappingly: Discrimination (98 scenarios, 50 fatal vs 48 deception, near-balanced 51%/49%); Operational (394 scenarios, 261 serious unsafe plus 133 safe including 41 Excessive Alerts reclassified as operational negatives); and Attribution (311 alert-required scenarios). We evaluated 40 frontier LLMs from 10 providers over 3 runs per scenario at temperature 0.2 (or the provider default where temperature is not configurable), yielding 59,040 evaluations conducted April 21-23, 2026. Results. Headline binary performance on the full benchmark spans a wide range across the 40 models: F1 78.5%-92.3%, accuracy 65.4%-89.8%, sensitivity 81.4%-100.0%, specificity 6.1%-81.8%. Leading models by F1 (o4-mini 92.3%; o3 92.2%) pair high sensitivity with meaningful specificity; three models saturate sensitivity at 100% but fall below 25% specificity, indistinguishable from a naive always-alert classifier. The wide spread on a single headline metric motivates tier-specific analyses, developed in a separate clinical paper. Discussion and Conclusion. PsiBench and the three-tier framework operationalize a rigorous evaluation rubric for LLM medication safety, grounded in two decades of national hospital audit experience. The framework generalizes to any binary medication-safety classifier (rule-based, conventional ML, or LLM-driven), supporting tier-aware model selection and post-deployment surveillance.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

High-Order Hermite Optimization: Fast and Exact Gradient Computation in Open-Loop Quantum Optimal Control using a Discrete Adjoint Approach

arXiv:2505.09857v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This work introduces the High-Order Hermite Optimization (HOHO) method, an open-loop discrete adjoint method for quantum optimal control. Our method is the first of its kind to efficiently compute exact (discrete) gradients when using continuous, parameterized control pulses while solving the forward equations (e.g. Schrodinger's equation or the Linblad master equation) with an arbitrarily high-order Hermite Runge-Kutta method. The HOHO method is implemented in QuantumGateDesign$.$jl (https://github.com/leespen1/QuantumGateDesign.jl), an open-source software package for the Julia programming language, which we use to perform numerical experiments comparing the method to Juqbox$.$jl (https://github.com/LLNL/Juqbox.jl). For realistic model problems we observe speedups up to 775x.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HiRo: A Compact Four-Directional Hierarchical Reservoir Token-Mixer for Efficient Image Classification

Recent image classification models must balance local feature modeling, cross-window interaction, and parameter efficiency. Many high-performing architectures rely on fully trainable token-mixers, which improve representation learning but increase parameter count, optimization complexity and computational cost. We propose a parameter-efficient image classification model called HiRo that integrates shifted-window partitioning with multi-directional hierarchical reservoir computing. Images are divided into non-overlapping patches (treated as tokens), linearly projected, normalized, and enriched with 2D sinusoidal positional encodings, then processed within local windows. Inside each window, tokens are scanned in four directions and passed through a two-stage slice-and-mix reservoir module. In the first stage, directional sequences are split into contiguous slices, each processed by its own fixed reservoir with a trainable closed-loop readout. The resulting slice outputs are summarized using the start, end, and mean representations, and then mixed by a second-stage fixed reservoir for each direction. The mixed slice representations are expanded back to the token level and fused with the first-stage outputs, after which the four directional outputs are realigned and averaged. Consecutive blocks alternate between regular and shifted windows to enable cross-window interaction, followed by layer normalization, a residual feed-forward network, and global pooling for classification. This design combines regular and shifted window partitioning with hierarchical multi-directional reservoirs to make an efficient local-to-cross-window token-mixing framework for image classification. Despite using under 1M trainable parameters and significantly lower memory and time than transformer-style baselines, HiRo also achieves 99.46%, 85.57%, and 59.10% accuracy on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100, respectively.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Estimating Individualized Treatment Effects in Acute Ischemic Stroke with Causal Transformation Models (TRAM-DAG): A Multi-Centre Observational Study with External RCT Validation

arXiv:2606.12623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personalized medicine in acute ischemic stroke requires moving beyond average treatment effects (ATE) to individualized treatment effect (ITE) estimates to support treatment decisions. In acute ischemic stroke, mechanical thrombectomy has been shown to be more effective on average than lysis in randomized controlled trials (RCTs), such as the MR CLEAN study. We aim to identify which individual patients benefit most from mechanical thrombectomy compared to lysis. The outcome of interest is the modified Rankin Scale (mRS) at three months, an ordinal measure of functional disability (0: no symptoms, 6: death). We demonstrate that causal transformation models on directed acyclic graphs (TRAM-DAG) can be used for ITE estimation after being fitted on observational MAGIC multi-center stroke patient data. To ensure comparability with the MR CLEAN population, which we use for validation, we train the TRAM-DAG on a MAGIC sub-population with NIHSS at admission >= 6, corresponding to one inclusion criterion of MR CLEAN. The fitted model is then used to estimate ITEs for stroke patients in the MR CLEAN population. While these ITE estimates cannot be confirmed experimentally, we show that their average is consistent with the trial's reported ATE. Furthermore, the ITE estimates correctly rank trial patients by their observed frequency of a good outcome (mRS at three months

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

Unified Multimodal Model for Brain MRI Imputation and Understanding

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold great potential for medicine, as they inherit knowledge from LLM and allow multiple data modalities to be integrated, analysed and interpreted in natural language. However, the field of medical MLLMs is constrained by non-trivial challenges, notably the scarcity of high-quality training data and the frequent occurrence of missing data in the real-world clinical setting. Here, we propose a novel unified multimodal model, UniBrain, for brain magnetic resonance image (MRI) analysis. To address potential missing brain MRI modalities, we employ a unified training strategy to perform joint imaging modality imputation and brain image understanding. During training, an interleaved and description-enriched data flow is constructed to train the model in an autoregressive manner, enabling medical reasoning with generated multimodal data. A self-alignment strategy is introduced to leverage dense image embeddings to learn fine-grained anatomical features without requiring detailed image captions. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic hidden state mechanism to alleviate the exposure bias during long-context multimodal inference. Extensive experiments on multi-disease brain MRI dataset demonstrate that UniBrain achieves high performance for brain image imputation, understanding, and disease diagnosis under various extents of modality incompleteness.

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

EvalStop: Using World Feedback to Detect and Correct Reward Overoptimization in Multi-Tenant RLHF Platforms

arXiv:2606.04145v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cloud LLM fine-tuning platforms increasingly serve RLHF workloads, where a learned reward model is optimized as a proxy for human quality. As Gao et al. (2023) showed, this proxy diverges from world feedback (downstream eval metrics) under sustained optimization pressure, a phenomenon known as reward overoptimization. Existing platform schedulers ignore this divergence: non-clairvoyant schedulers optimize JCT without any quality signal, SLAQ-style quality-aware schedulers use training loss (a weaker proxy that drops monotonically through hacking), and classical per-job early stopping requires human monitoring and does not free shared GPUs. We propose EvalStop, a composable scheduling primitive that terminates jobs on k consecutive eval-score declines, releases GPUs, preserves the best checkpoint, and delegates to any base scheduler. We frame scheduler-level early stopping as a detection problem and evaluate it in a discrete-event simulator whose RLHF workload mixes reward-hacking and structurally healthy runs, with ground-truth labels hidden from schedulers. On RLHF-heavy workloads (80% RLHF, 64 GPUs), EvalStop achieves precision 98% / recall 99% / FPR 1.5% while improving JCT by 9% and cutting wasted compute by 22% over SRTF-Est (p

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

Interpreting Neural Combinatorial Optimization via Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) achieves strong performance, yet its black-box nature remains a key roadblock to deployment and scientific diagnosis. Standard interpretability tools, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are ill-equipped for NCO, whose decisions are dynamic, state-dependent, and lack proper concept vocabulary definition. To close this gap, we introduce Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks (EPB), to our knowledge, the first framework for interpreting NCO policies by distilling black-box NCO models into human-readable program portfolios. EPB employs an LLM to autonomously evolve a bank of programs, where each program's per-step action distribution serves as the bottleneck. EPB works through an iterative framework: Block I fixes program bank capacity and introduces a hybrid textual-numerical gradient descent scheme that couples numerical gradients for student router updates and textual gradients for LLM-based program revision; Block II dynamically adapts bank capacity via fault-targeted expansion and redundancy pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate EPB's effectiveness and broad applicability, where the distilled program portfolios largely match original performance. EPB also reveals that NCO behavior shifts across optimization stages and can be approximated as a composition of classic heuristic variants. Our work advances interpretable NCO and establishes EPB as a promising tool for interpreting sequential decision-making models.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Stable, bidirectional electro-optic transduction in thin film lithium tantalate

arXiv:2606.12726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient and stable microwave-optical transduction is a key enabling technology for distributed superconducting quantum computing and heterogeneous quantum networks. Electro-optic transducers based on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) have shown strong promise, but demonstrations to date have been limited by various factors such as low frequency bias drift, low efficiency, fabrication complexity, and scalability. Here we demonstrate the first integrated electro-optic microwave-optical transducers realized in thin-film lithium tantalate (TFLT), a material platform offering Pockels nonlinearity comparable to TFLN together with improved bias stability and high-power handling. We fabricate superconducting microwave resonators coupled to tunable photonic-molecule optical resonators using wafer-scale deep ultraviolet lithography, offering high-throughput production of hundreds of devices per wafer. Across six devices we observe coherent bidirectional conversion between C-band optical photons and 4.9-5.5 GHz microwave photons, with measured on-chip efficiencies and inferred single-photon coupling rates g_0/2{\pi} ~ 1 kHz consistent with theory. Continuous operation over multiple days is achieved using a static bias field with minimal feedback, demonstrating a major operational advantage. We further characterize optical loss statistics, microwave resonator performance, and optically induced added noise under pulsed pumping, finding less than one added photon for 100 microsecond pulses at the highest measured efficiencies. These results establish TFLT as a scalable and robust electro-optic platform for future quantum interconnects and modular quantum processors.

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

Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling via Early-Step Latent Verification for Image Editing

Instruction-based image editing has made notable progress with recent advances in generative models. However, the quality of the edited result is still influenced by the randomly sampled initial noise, particularly in complex editing scenarios. An unsuitable initial noise may lead to unsatisfactory editing results. Recent inference-time scaling methods address this issue by sampling multiple initial noises and selecting better candidates. Nevertheless, most of them follow a decode-then-verify scheme which introduces an efficiency-accuracy trade-off. When decoding is performed after limited inference steps, the decoded images often remain too noisy for reliable assessment, whereas sufficiently denoised images require much higher computational cost. To address this issue, we propose VeriLatent, a plug-and-play adaptive inference-time scaling framework with early-step latent verification for image editing. Specifically, we propose a novel verifier that scores each initial noise through a latent-space editing activation map at an early stage. It identifies promising candidates by assessing whether they can induce an effective edit in the correct region. This enables efficient early pruning without decoding latents into images. Building on this, we further develop an adaptive search strategy for inference-time scaling. It allocates inference budgets according to editing difficulty, thereby reducing the number of function evaluations (NFE). Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and different base models demonstrate that VeriLatent consistently improves both editing performance and inference-time scaling efficiency.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Improving Cross-Format Robustness in Language Models with Multi-Format Training

Large language models often remain sensitive to answer format: a question solved correctly in one form may fail in another semantically equivalent form. To study this gap, we define cross-format robustness as the extent to which a model answers the same underlying question consistently across formats. We then compare full-format training with FormatMix, which expands only a subset of training items into multiple equivalent formats using either random or targeted selection. Across GLM4 and Llama-3.1, multi-format supervision consistently improves both task performance and cross-format robustness, whereas Multiple-choice question (MCQ)-only supervision alone brings little benefit and can even reduce robustness. We further find that expanding only about 30% of the training set into multiple formats often recovers most of the gain from full-format training, and this effect appears across the model families and sizes we study. These results suggest that format diversity, rather than additional supervision alone, is the key driver of robustness. That lightweight multi-format augmentation is a practical way to make LLMs less sensitive to answer format without changing the base model.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

A Quantum Approach to Stochastic Optimization in Insurance Underwriting

arXiv:2605.01169v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The presence of stochastic elements in combinatorial optimization problems makes them particularly challenging, as such problems quickly become intractable for classical computers even at relatively small sizes. In this work, we propose a novel quantum-classical hybrid scheme for solving a class of stochastic optimization problems known as chance-constrained knapsack problems, in which item weights follow probability distributions and constraints may be violated within a specified risk tolerance. Our method employs knapsack-specific QAOA-based circuits to generate samples which, when combined with a new self-consistent classical recovery scheme introduced in this work, produce high-quality solutions. Experiments carried out on IBM Heron processors, using circuits with depths up to 177 and comprising 3443 gates acting on as many as 150 qubits, yield solutions that indicate performance comparable to classical optimization schemes. The proposed quantum-classical scheme paves the way to tackling such problems, with the potential to outperform approaches that rely solely on classical computation.

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

An Extensible and Lightweight Unified Architecture for Demosaicing Pixel-bin Image Sensors

Pixel-bin image sensors are becoming the default choice for smartphone cameras due to their resolution vs light-gathering trade-off. However, their larger inter-color separation compared to the Bayer color filter array (CFA) makes them challenging to demosaic. Furthermore, existing deep learning-based demosaicing methods are CFA-specific, requiring multiple individual models that take up precious onboard resources and demand larger development and maintenance efforts. In this work, we propose a modular unified architecture for demosaicing various pixel-bin sensors that provides higher image quality while being extensible and lightweight. Additionally, to enable plug-and-play operation, we introduce a learning-free CFA-identification module to detect the CFA type of raw data accurately.

24.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-26

Requiring code sharing to strengthen transparency and trust in research

by Helen Lumbard, Lauren Cadwallader, Devin Soper, on behalf of the PLOS Medicine Staff Editors PLOS Medicine has always championed open science and data transparency. Now, recognizing that code is as essential a research artifact as the data it analyzes, we are strengthening our code sharing policy to further ensure reproducibility and trust in the scientific record. Recognizing that code is as essential a research artifact as the data it analyzes, this Editorial outlines how PLOS Medicine is strengthening its code sharing policy to further ensure reproducibility and trust in the scientific record.

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

Annealed Entropic Allocation for Ranking and Selection

arXiv:2606.11347v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose Annealed Entropic Allocation, an annealed weighted soft-min framework for sequential budget allocation in ranking and selection. The central idea is to replace the non-smooth maximin large-deviation rate objective with a weighted log-sum-exp surrogate that aggregates challenger-specific pairwise scores through soft-min weights, mitigating hard switching when several challengers are nearly active. To improve finite-budget discrimination, we incorporate the saddlepoint approximation – a sub-exponential correction derived from refined pairwise tail asymptotics. Because these corrections are sub-exponential and the smoothing parameter is annealed to zero, the surrogate preserves the same first-order large-deviation target as the classical maximin formulation. We show that the surrogate converges uniformly to the hard minimum, that the soft-min weights concentrate on the active challengers, and that, under fixed weights, the induced target allocation map is continuous on the simplex interior. Numerical experiments on Gaussian and exponential instances demonstrate competitive performance, especially when multiple challengers are nearly tied.