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.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Distinct Neuronal, Proliferative, and Secretory Pathways are Perturbed in Cancer Survivors with Depressive Symptoms

Introduction Depression is highly prevalent among cancer survivors and may be biologically distinct, although clinical studies investigating these mechanisms remain limited. Thus, the aims of this study were to (1) identify perturbed biological pathways associated with depressive symptom severity in cancer survivors, and (2) investigate whether these pathways are common or distinct to those perturbed in an age-matched non-cancer cohort. Methods We analyzed cross-sectional self-reported and transcriptomic data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (PHD #39341). Cancer survivors and an age-matched non-cancer cohort (target ratio 1:2) were identified. The 20-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) was used to split participants into low (CES-D

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SAERec: Constructing Fine-grained Interpretable Intents Priors via Sparse Autoencoders for Recommendation

arXiv:2606.18897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intent-based recommender systems have gained significant attention for improving accuracy and interpretability by modeling the underlying motivations behind user behaviors. Most existing models derive intents directly from user sequences via clustering or prototype learning. However, they are sensitive to sequence quality, require presetting the number of intents, and lack explicit semantic grounding. These issues lead to an incomplete and coarse intent set and limit the effectiveness of recommendation. In this paper, we propose the Sparse Autoencoder for intent-based recommendation (SAERec), a novel recommender that automatically constructs a fine-grained and interpretable intent space from a textual corpus to guide recommendation. Rather than treating texts as side signals, SAERec leverages them as high information density evidence for intent construction. Specifically, we first extract a comprehensive set of fine-grained interpretable intents from the latent space of large language models (LLMs) by using a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to disentangle and interpret text embeddings, which isolates intent-related semantics from textual noise. Then, for each user, we retrieve relevant intents from this set as priors to guide recommendation. It contains personal intents matching a user's current interests and public intents capturing general item patterns shared across users (e.g., quality, price). Finally, to integrate retrieved intents into sequence modeling, we propose a multi-branch attention mechanism that captures temporal dependencies and injects both personal and public intent signals, followed by an adaptive fusion layer to construct the final user representation for recommendation. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of SAERec, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while providing human-understandable explanations.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module

Channel and spatial attention mechanisms introduced in earlier work enhance the representational capabilities of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but often increase parameter and computational costs. While recent approaches focus solely on efficient feature context modeling for channel attention, we aim to model both channel and spatial attention comprehensively with minimal parameters and reduced computation. Leveraging the principles of relational modeling in graphs, we introduce a constant-parameter module, STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module, which integrates channel and spatial attention to enhance the representation power of CNNs. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a graph-based approach for modeling both channel and spatial attention, utilizing concepts from multi-head graph transformers. Additionally, we introduce Output Guided Pooling (OGP), which efficiently captures spatial context to further enhance spatial attention. We extensively evaluate STEAM for large-scale image classification, object detection and instance segmentation on standard benchmark datasets. STEAM achieves a \(2\%\) increase in accuracy over the standard ResNet-50 model with only a meager increase in GFLOPs. Furthermore, STEAM outperforms the leading modules, ECA and GCT, in terms of accuracy while achieving a threefold reduction in GFLOPs. The code will be made available upon acceptance.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

LVLMs and Humans Ground Differently in Referential Communication

For generative AI agents to partner effectively with human users, the ability to accurately predict human intent is critical. But this ability to collaborate remains limited by a critical deficit: an inability to model common ground. We present a referential communication experiment with a factorial design involving director-matcher pairs (human-human, human-AI, AI-human, and AI-AI) that interact with multiple turns in repeated rounds to match pictures of objects not associated with any obvious lexicalized labels. We show that LVLMs cannot interactively generate and resolve referring expressions in a way that enables smooth communication, a crucial skill that underlies human language use. We release our corpus of 356 dialogues (89 pairs over 4 rounds each) along with the online pipeline for data collection and the tools for analyzing accuracy, efficiency, and lexical overlap.

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

Rethinking Cross-lingual Gaps from a Statistical Viewpoint

Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a bridge by acquiring knowledge from a source language and making it accessible when queried using target languages. A cross-lingual gap is a drop in accuracy incurred when querying knowledge in a target language rather than the source language. Existing research focused on modeling or training failures leading to cross-lingual gaps. In this work, we take an alternative view to characterize the nature of cross-lingual error, and hypothesize that the variance of responses in the target language is a key cause of this gap. For the first time, we formalize the cross-lingual gap in terms of biased and unbiased errors. We empirically validate our hypothesis through multiple inference-time interventions that control variance and reduce the cross-lingual gap. We demonstrate a few test-time ensemble methods that reduce response variance, and thereby improve source-target transfer scores by up to 12 absolute points yielding relative gains of 8% to over 50% across various LLMs.

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

Superconductor-"Metal" Transition of One-dimensional Interacting Bosons with Ohmic Quantum Dissipation

arXiv:2605.30746v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The phase diagram of a system of interacting bosons (Cooper pairs) hoping on a one-dimensional (1D) lattice with onsite phase dissipation describing the Josephson tunneling to a nearby diffusive normal-metal electrode is studied. Starting from the system at commensurate lattice filling, it is shown by a combination of analytical techniques that the phase diagram contains two quantum phases: A dissipative Bose-Einstein condensate (D-BEC) or superconductor with long-range phase coherence, and a dissipative Mott insulator (D-Mott) or "metal" with exponentially decaying phase correlations in space and local imaginary-time correlations decaying as the local pairing correlations of the electrode. The D-Mott/metal phase can be described as a 1D array of dissipative boson puddles, weakly coupled by Josephson tunneling. The puddle size roughly corresponds to the length scale beyond which phase slips suppress phase coherence. The dissipative time-dependent Ginsburg-Landau theory phenomenologically used by Sachdev, Werner, and Troyer [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 92} 237003 (2004)] for the superconductor-metal transition in quasi-1D wires is derived from this microscopic puddle picture. Thus, the criticality of the D-Mott/D-BEC transition is shown to belong to the Wilson-Fisher universality class with dynamical exponent $z\approx 2$. At small doping, the D-Mott/metal phase remains stable due to its finite compressibility, which is computed to leading order in a perturbation expansion of the dissipation strength and the inter-puddle Josephson coupling. At larger doping, using a mapping to a pseudospin chain combined with bosonization, the D-BEC/superconductor phase is the ground state for non-vanishing but arbitrarily small dissipation. Similarities and differences with deconfinement transition of an array 1D bosonic Mott insulators in anisotropic optical lattices are also discussed.

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

Is Code Better Than Language for Algorithmic Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For tool-augmented language models, comparing natural-language reasoning with code-execution pipelines is difficult because the comparison changes both the intermediate representation and the execution mechanism. We separate these factors with an intermediate intervention: the model expresses its reasoning as executable code, and the language model simulates that code in context to produce an answer. On a 40-task verifiable algorithmic benchmark, deterministic code execution outperforms natural-language reasoning by +31.6pp. We observe that the intermediate intervention is not meaningfully different from natural-language reasoning (+0.15pp). These results suggest that, in our evaluated setting, changing the intermediate representation alone does not explain the tool-use advantage, providing evidence for the performance gains requiring reliable external execution. We formalize this intuition with a simple statistical decision-theoretic model that characterizes when execution dominates end-to-end risk in our disentangled trace-generation/execution regime. We validate our theory using a reconstruction intervention that leverages a proxy language model to infer natural-language reasoning traces from code representations, recovering performance comparable to the original natural-language reasoning pipeline. All experiments are at https://github.com/TerryTong-Git/ToolProj.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

S$^2$COPE: Self-Supervised Concept Discovery via Preference Learning

Current representation learning paradigms force a fundamental compromise: self-supervised methods scale to massive datasets but yield opaque features, whereas interpretable models remain bottlenecked by the need for dense human annotation. We introduce Self-Supervised Concept discOvery via Preference lEarning (\model), a label-free framework that resolves this dilemma. Instead of treating Vision-Large-Language Models (VLLMs) as static feature extractors, \model leverages them as active participants in a self-supervised preference optimization loop. By autonomously hypothesizing, validating, and reinforcing candidate visual attributes directly from raw imagery, our framework discovers novel, structured concepts without a single label. Extensive experiments across natural, medical, and physics domains demonstrate that \model successfully extracts domain-specific concepts where standard VLLMs often fail to generate. By amortizing concept discovery directly into the VLLM backbone through our self-supervised preference objective – rather than relying on static generation and disjoint filtering – we achieve up to a 24-point absolute improvement in downstream top-1 classification accuracy on unseen data. Our work suggest that interpretability can emerge through a model's autonomous interaction with incidental visual structures, without any human supervision.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-Hermitian Crystalline Braid Topology from Hermitian Projection: A Zero-Mode Resonance Mechanism

arXiv:2606.06626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian topological phases are typically engineered through gain and loss, nonreciprocity, or interaction with an environment. Here we show that they can instead emerge purely by projecting a fully Hermitian, topologically trivial parent lattice onto an embedded subsystem. The mechanism is general: when a zero mode of the eliminated degrees of freedom couples to the retained subsystem, the embedding self-energy develops a pole, the zero-frequency description becomes singular, and topology is carried by the finite-frequency projected Green's function. We realize the mechanism exactly in a trivial nearest-neighbor square lattice with an embedded one-dimensional zig-zag brane. In the periodic transverse geometry, the parity of the eliminated complement selects the outcome: even sectors reduce to a regular Schur complement and yield conventional SSH-type descendants, whereas odd sectors host a sublattice-imbalance zero mode and follow the resonant route. There, the complex bands braid through isolated finite-frequency exceptional points (EPs), while a parity symmetry inherited from the embedding, together with $\mathrm{TRS}^{\dagger}$, induces conjugated pseudo-Hermiticity and quantizes the complex Berry phase. The stable bulk invariant of the nondegenerate phases is this quantized complex Berry phase; adjacent sectors are separated by parity-paired exceptional points whose half-integer vorticities encode the local exchange of complex-energy strands.The absence of the non-Hermitian skin effect ensures that the invariant is defined directly on the ordinary Brillouin zone. A topolectrical implementation of the projected response predicts momentum-resolved transmission minima at the exceptional-point transition frequencies together with a characteristic low-frequency resonant admittance, providing an experimentally testable signature of the mechanism.

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

Decoupled Mixture-of-Experts for Parametric Knowledge Injection

Knowledge injection aims to equip large language models (LLMs) with external, domain-specific, or time-sensitive knowledge. Existing approaches typically face a trade-off between flexibility and integration: retrieval-augmented generation keeps knowledge outside the model but only provides prompt-level augmentation, whereas post-training based methods encode new knowledge into shared parameters but may introduce catastrophic forgetting, knowledge conflict, and costly updates. In this paper, we propose Decoupled Mixture-of-Experts (DMoE), a modular architecture for parametric knowledge injection that decouples both experts and the router from the base model. DMoE converts external knowledge corpora into independently updatable expert modules and uses a lightweight uncertainty-aware router to activate relevant experts only when the base model lacks sufficient knowledge during generation. To support efficient auto-regressive inference, DMoE attaches experts only to the final-layer feed-forward network, preserving KV-cache reuse while enabling parameter-level knowledge augmentation. Experiments on knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that DMoE consistently improves answer quality over retrieval and adapter-based baselines.

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

NeST: Neuron Selective Tuning for LLM Safety

arXiv:2602.16835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing approaches often rely on heavyweight fine-tuning that is costly to update, audit, and maintain across model families. Full fine-tuning incurs substantial computational and storage overhead, while parameter-efficient methods, e.g., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), trade efficiency for inconsistent safety gains and sensitivity to design choices. Safety intervention mechanisms reduce unsafe outputs without modifying model weights, but do not directly shape or preserve the internal representations that govern safety behavior. We present NeST, a Neuron-Selective Tuning framework for efficient post-hoc safety alignment. NeST identifies safety-relevant feed-forward neurons via activation probing on vanilla harmful and benign prompts, clusters neurons with similar activation profiles, and trains shared cluster-level updates while freezing the rest of the model. Importantly, NeST is trained only on vanilla malicious prompts, without using jailbreak-specific attack data, yet generalizes robustly to diverse jailbreaks. The learned updates are then folded into the original weights, incurring no inference-time overhead. Evaluated on 14 open-weight language and multimodal models, NeST outperforms lightweight baselines and approaches full fine-tuning robustness with significantly fewer trainable parameters. On text-only models, NeST reduces average jailbreak attack success rate from 44.5% to 1.1% while training only 0.4M parameters on average. Across multimodal settings, it reduces ASR from 55.3% to 1.1%, and for downstream fine-tuned variants, it restores safety by reducing ASR from 53.8% to 0.8%. These results show that robust, maintainable safety alignment can be achieved by concentrating adaptation on localized, functionally coherent safety structures.

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

TRON: Tracing Rays to Orchestrate a Neural Renderer for 3D Gaussian Reconstructions

We introduce TRON, a rendering framework that combines 3D Gaussian ray tracing with neural rendering to enable realistic and controllable rendering of real-world 3D scenes under novel lighting, dynamic object motion, object insertion, and material editing. Prior approaches that rely solely on physically based rendering (PBR) of Gaussian representations struggle to achieve realistic relighting due to imperfections in reconstructed geometry, material estimates, and light transport estimation. At the same time, neural rendering methods often lack an explicit scene representation, limiting their ability to support interactive editing with fine-grained manipulation. TRON bridges these two paradigms. We use intrinsic decomposition priors from a learned inverse rendering model to regularize the material properties of a Gaussian field, and repurpose a ray tracer to provide radiometric guidance rather than final pixels. By treating this output as a structured 3D scaffold, we empower a lightweight neural renderer to bridge the domain gap between shading-model constrained estimates and photorealistic output. Our key insight is that the combination of explicit 3D knowledge with robust material priors provides speed and controllability, while neural rendering enables the synthesis of photorealistic images. To support real-world scenarios, we train our neural renderer with a multi-stage strategy consisting of large-scale pretraining and targeted fine-tuning on a newly constructed dataset of 2.1M rendered synthetic and real-world frames from 3D reconstructions. TRON outperforms Gaussian-based relighting methods in realism, and prior neural renderers in editability and speed. To the best of our knowledge, TRON is the first method to enable practical interactive applications in captured 3D environments, offering realistic appearance under dynamic geometric, lighting and material conditions.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Polarization-Resolved Photon Statistics of Cavity Quantum Materials

arXiv:2606.11550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: By forming hybrid light-matter states, optical cavities offer a route for engineering material properties, however, unambiguously probing the effects of light-matter coupling remains difficult. Here, we show that the polarization-resolved statistics of photons transmitted through a cavity, measurable via $g^{(2)}$, provide one such diagnostic. By relating $g^{(2)}$ to matter correlation functions such as the Raman structure factor, we link photon bunching and antibunching to material properties. By applying this method to the stripy-to-antiferromagnetic transition in the Kitaev-Heisenberg spin model, we find that polarization-dependent patterns of bunching and antibunching encode the magnetic point-group symmetries of each phase and characterize the behavior at the phase boundary. Finally, we predict measuring $g^{(2)}$ for output photon pairs polarized orthogonal to the input field will isolate higher-order light-matter scattering processes that probe higher-order material correlations.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Erased but Not Forgotten: How Backdoors Compromise Concept Erasure

arXiv:2504.21072v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The expansion of text-to-image diffusion models has raised concerns about harmful outputs, from fabricated depictions of public figures to sexually explicit imagery. To mitigate such risks, prior work has proposed concept erasure methods that aim to sever unwanted concepts from the model via fine-tuning, yet it remains unclear whether these approaches truly remove all links to the harmful concept or merely conceal superficial connections. In this work, we reveal a critical vulnerability, the Erasure Evasion Backdoor (EEB): an adversary binds a backdoor trigger to a concept slated for removal, and this malicious link survives subsequent erasure. We show that both black-box and white-box adversaries can instantiate this threat. Across six state-of-the-art erasure methods, including robust ones that explicitly search for alternative representations of the target concept, EEB consistently exposes harmful content: up to 82% success against celebrity-identity unlearning, up to 94% for object erasure, and up to 16 times amplification of explicit-content exposure. While EEB uncovers a blind spot in current erasure methods, it also provides a diagnostic tool for stress-testing future concept erasure techniques.

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

WildIFEval: Instruction Following in the Wild

Recent LLMs have shown remarkable success in following user instructions, yet handling instructions with multiple constraints remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce WildIFEval - a large-scale dataset of 7K real user instructions with diverse, multi-constraint conditions. Unlike prior datasets, our collection spans a broad lexical and topical spectrum of constraints, extracted from natural user instructions. We categorize these constraints into eight high-level classes to capture their distribution and dynamics in real-world scenarios. Leveraging WildIFEval, we conduct extensive experiments to benchmark the instruction-following capabilities of leading LLMs. WildIFEval clearly differentiates between small and large models, and demonstrates that all models have a large room for improvement on such tasks. We analyze the effects of the number and type of constraints on performance, revealing interesting patterns of model constraint-following behavior. We release our dataset to promote further research on instruction-following under complex, realistic conditions.

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

Prototyping an AI-powered Tool for Energy Efficiency in New Zealand Homes

arXiv:2509.05364v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Residential buildings contribute significantly to energy use, health outcomes, and carbon emissions. In New Zealand, housing quality has historically been poor, with inadequate insulation and inefficient heating contributing to widespread energy hardship. Recent reforms, including the Warmer Kiwi Homes program, Healthy Homes Standards, and H1 Building Code upgrades, have delivered health and comfort improvements, yet challenges persist. Many retrofits remain partial, data on household performance are limited, and decision-making support for homeowners is fragmented. This study presents the design and evaluation of an AI-powered decision-support tool for residential energy efficiency in New Zealand. The prototype, developed using Python and Streamlit, integrates data ingestion, anomaly detection, baseline modeling, and scenario simulation (e.g., LED retrofits, insulation upgrades) into a modular dashboard. Fifteen domain experts, including building scientists, consultants, and policy practitioners, tested the tool through semi-structured interviews. Results show strong usability (M = 4.3), high value of scenario outputs (M = 4.5), and positive perceptions of its potential to complement subsidy programs and regulatory frameworks. The tool demonstrates how AI can translate national policies into personalized, household-level guidance, bridging the gap between funding, standards, and practical decision-making. Its significance lies in offering a replicable framework for reducing energy hardship, improving health outcomes, and supporting climate goals. Future development should focus on carbon metrics, tariff modeling, integration with national datasets, and longitudinal trials to assess real-world adoption.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies

arXiv:2502.06866v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is essential to comprehend the long-term implications of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple dimensions of living conditions. In this study, we present an approach to quantifying the quality of life through the Global Ease of Living Index that combines various socio-economic and infrastructural factors into a single composite score. Our index utilises economic indicators that define living standards, which could help in targeted interventions to improve specific areas. We present a machine learning framework to address missing data for certain economic indicators in specific countries. We then curate and update the data and use a dimensionality reduction approach (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis) to create the Ease of Living Index for major economies since 1970. Our work significantly adds to the literature by offering a practical tool for policymakers to identify areas needing improvement, such as healthcare systems, employment opportunities, and public safety. Our approach with open data and code can be easily reproduced and applied to various contexts, providing transparency and accessibility for ongoing research and policy development in quality-of-life assessment.

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

Domain Generalizable Adaptation of 3D Vision-Language Models via Regularized Fine-Tuning

Domain adaptation remains a central challenge in 3D vision, especially for multimodal foundation models that align 3D point clouds with visual and textual data. While these models demonstrate strong general capabilities, adapting them to downstream domains with limited data often leads to overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we introduce ReFine3D, a regularized fine-tuning framework designed for domain-generalizable tuning of 3D large multimodal models (LMMs). ReFine3D combines selective layer tuning with two targeted regularization strategies: multi-view consistency across augmented point clouds and text diversity through synonym-based prompts generated by large language models. Additionally, we incorporate point-rendered vision supervision and a test-time augmentation mechanism with confidence-based aggregation to further enhance robustness. Extensive experiments across different 3D domain generalization benchmarks show that ReFine3D improves base-to-novel class generalization by 1.36%, cross-dataset transfer by 2.43%, robustness to corruption by 1.80%, and few-shot accuracy by up to 3.11%, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods with minimal added computational overhead.

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

Risk Under Pressure: Compute-Aware Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness in Language Models

arXiv:2606.11409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial robustness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) typically report attack success rate (ASR) under fixed query budgets, implicitly treating all attacks as equally costly. In practice, the computational expense of different attack strategies can vary by orders of magnitude. Consequently, ASR at a fixed budget can obscure the true effort required to jailbreak a model, thereby making it hard to determine whether an attack's cost justifies its payoff to the attacker. We propose a compute-aware evaluation framework based on computational pressure, measured in cumulative floating-point operations (FLOPs), as a proxy for adversarial effort. We introduce risk-compute curves, which map compute budgets to attack risk, and derive two metrics that summarize the average pressure required for a given attack to succeed. Across ten models spanning three families and four different stages in language model training and alignment, evaluated with three attack strategies (gradient-based, iterative refinement, and template-based) on two jailbreak robustness benchmarks, we find: (1) alignment training has non-monotonic effects on compute-space robustness; (2) scaling model size reduces gradient-based attack effectiveness but has limited impact on cheaper template-based attacks; (3) gradient-based attacks optimized on a surrogate model can transfer to a separate target model, providing a way to reduce attacker costs; (4) compute cost varies by up to ${\approx}5{\times}$ across harm categories within a single model; and (5) safety-aligned RL increases aggregate cost while leaving some categories disproportionately accessible. We release our framework to enable compute-aware risk assessment and evaluation.

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

SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Tasks

Spatial reasoning is a foundational capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to perceive and operate within the physical world. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on passive evaluation (e.g., static VQA) or simulator-specific pipelines, failing to assess general interactive spatial understanding. We introduce SpatialWorld, a unified benchmark designed specifically for evaluating the interactive spatial understanding of multimodal agents in complex real-world tasks. Integrating eight heterogeneous simulation backends under a shared, simulator-agnostic protocol, SpatialWorld features 760 human-annotated tasks across diverse domains (e.g., household routines, travel, social collaboration). Agents must solve tasks under vision-only partial observability, actively gathering egocentric visual evidence and expressing decisions via a unified, text-based action interface native to MLLMs. For reliable evaluation, each task includes a human-validated initial state, a reference trajectory, and a terminal-state verifier. Evaluating 15 advanced agents reveals that robust spatial task solving remains challenging: the strongest model, GPT-5, achieves an average task success rate (TSR) of only 17.4%, while the leading open-source model, Qwen-3.5, reaches 14.1%. Further analysis exposes a clear mismatch between task success and execution efficiency, alongside substantial domain-specific performance variations. These bottlenecks in active exploration and long-horizon planning position SpatialWorld as a rigorous testbed for future spatial agents.

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

Benchmarking Vision Foundation Models for Domain-Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) remains challenging due to the requirement for robust domain generalization across unseen environments. While recent trends leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for semantic supervision, these multimodal approaches often demand prohibitive computational resources and exhibit high inference latency. Furthermore, their efficacy is inherently limited by the quality of the underlying visual features. This paper revisits the potential of vision-only foundation models to establish a highly efficient and robust baseline for FAS. We conduct a systematic benchmarking of 15 pre-trained models, such as supervised CNNs, supervised ViTs, and self-supervised ViTs, under severe cross-domain scenarios including the MICO and Limited Source Domains (LSD) protocols. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that self-supervised vision models, particularly DINOv2 with Registers, significantly suppress attention artifacts and capture critical, fine-grained spoofing cues. Combined with Face Anti-Spoofing Data Augmentation (FAS-Aug), Patch-wise Data Augmentation (PDA) and Attention-weighted Patch Loss (APL), our proposed vision-only baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance in the MICO protocol. This baseline outperforms existing methods under the data-constrained LSD protocol while maintaining superior computational efficiency. This work provides a definitive vision-only baseline for FAS, demonstrating that optimized self-supervised vision transformers can serve as a backbone for both vision-only and future multimodal FAS systems. The project page is available at: https://gsisaoki.github.io/FAS-VFMbenchmark-CVPRW2026/ .

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

To Cool, or Not to Cool? Displacement Sensing with Hot Quantum States

arXiv:2606.13650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum-enhanced displacement sensing with bosonic systems is typically formulated assuming that the oscillator is cooled close to its ground state before nonclassical probe preparation. We investigate whether such near-ground-state initialization is necessary, or whether sensitive probes can instead be generated directly from thermal states. We analyze hot quantum probes produced by squeezing, number-raising, and Schrödinger-cat-state generation applied to thermal inputs. We identify two distinct mechanisms by which thermal mixedness can remain compatible with enhanced displacement sensitivity. First, projecting a mixed probe onto a definite parity sector removes the usual thermal suppression of the displacement quantum Fisher information, which can then increase with initial thermal occupation. Second, coherent superpositions of opposite displacements can retain sensitivity through coherence between their displaced components, even when the underlying state is mixed. We use these two mechanisms to classify hot-state protocols according to whether their sensitivity comes from parity selection, coherence between displaced components, or both. Finally, we formulate an experimentally relevant optimization problem comparing initial cooling with direct hot-state preparation under realistic decoherence and show that complete cooling is not universally optimal. Our results establish hot-state engineering as a route to quantum-enhanced bosonic displacement sensing without mandatory ground-state initialization.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Gender Differences in AI Literacy Workshop Outcomes and Deepfake Engagement

arXiv:2606.14718v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy initiatives expand in K-12 settings, understanding how gender shapes student baseline perceptions, tool-use, and responsiveness to interventions is essential for equitable curriculum design. This study examines gender differences in AI literacy, safety awareness, and STEM career aspirations among Australian secondary students (Years 7, 8, and 10; N(pre) = 199, n(post) = 136) from two co-educational government schools who participated in a one-day AI literacy workshop. Using statistical regression methods controlling for year level and school, we found that pre-workshop, male students reported significantly higher STEM career interest across all three domains (AI, computer science, and engineering), while female students were significantly more likely to use AI for schoolwork and to seek advice from AI tools. Gender-differentiated patterns also emerged in deepfake behaviours: males were significantly more likely to have created or shared deepfake content. Both genders improved in AI knowledge post-intervention, yet females showed a richer profile of gains: wider conceptual understanding, greater confidence, and meaningful increases in AI and CS career interest that partially narrowed the gender STEM gap. These findings highlight the need for gender-responsive AI curricula, particularly deepfake safety education for male students, and demonstrate that even single-day workshops can narrow gender gaps in STEM aspirations and AI confidence.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Stochastic control with dividend payments and capital injections for Markov additive processes

作者:

arXiv:2604.00190v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by de Finetti's optimal dividend problem with capital injections, we study a stochastic control problem for the additive component of a Markov additive process (MAP). In contrast to previous studies, the modulating component is allowed to be a general right process on a Radon space, so the model is not restricted to finite-state regime switching and cannot in general be reduced to a finite collection of Lévy process control problems. Capital injections are allowed at arbitrary times. We first consider the case in which dividend payments are allowed only at prescribed discrete times and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of a strategy. These conditions then yield the optimality of a class of Markov-modulated periodic–classical barrier strategies. Combining this optimality result with an approximation argument, we obtain insight into the possible form of optimal strategies in the case where dividend payments, like capital injections, may be made at arbitrary times. Because of the generality of the MAPs considered here, the proof techniques used in previous studies of similar problems are not directly applicable. We therefore develop an alternative argument based on the additive structure of MAPs and dynamic programming between dividend opportunities. The argument also suggests a possible approach to other stochastic control problems involving general MAPs.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

ForceForget: Reinforcement Concept Removal for Enhancing Safety in Text-to-Image Models

With the advance of generative AI, the text-to-image (T2I) model has the ability to generate various contents. However, T2I models still can generate unsafe contents. To alleviate this issue, various concept erasing methods are proposed. However, existing methods tend to excessively erase unsafe concepts and suppress benign concepts contained in harmful prompts, which can negatively affect model utility. In this paper, we focus on eliminating unsafe content while maintaining model capability in safe semantic meaning interpretation by optimizing the concept erasing reward (CER) with reinforcement learning. To avoid overly content erasure, we introduce the Safe Adapter to project partial text embedding for efficient concept regulation in cross-attention layers. Extensive experiments conducted on different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in alleviating unsafe content generation while preserving the high fidelity of benign images compared with existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) concept erasing methods. In terms of robustness, our method outperforms counterparts against red-teaming tools. Moreover, we showcase the proposed approach is more effective in emerging image-to-image (I2I) scenarios compared with others. Lastly, we extend our method to erase general concepts, such as artistic styles and objects. Disclaimer: This paper includes discussions of sexually explicit content that may be offensive to certain readers. All images used in this work are synthesized or from public datasets.