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.CV) 2026-06-17

Improving and Evaluating Hand-Object Interaction Detection

Understanding hands and the objects they interact with, both directly and through tools, is a key step for tasks ranging from action perception to 3D reconstruction and robotics. Our paper provides several contributions to the Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) understanding literature: (1) HOI-DETR, a new framework that introduces hand-object and object-object interactions to the Co-DETR architecture to produce a state-of-the-art method; (2) a comprehensive HOI evaluation suite of 4 diverse datasets, including a video benchmark derived from the HD-EPIC dataset and fresh annotations that improve the Hands23 benchmark and (3) a trained checkpoint that significantly improves the state of the art across Hands23, HOIST, FineBio, and HD-EPIC, including mAP gains of over 20 percentage points on Hands23 and FineBio. Our ablations confirm the contributions of each model component.

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

Grammar-Constrained Decoding Can Jailbreak LLMs into Generating Malicious Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code generation, raising concerns that they may be misused to produce malicious code. Meanwhile, Grammar-Constrained Decoding (GCD) has been widely adopted to improve the reliability of LLM-generated code by enforcing syntactic validity. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive risk: this reliability-oriented technique can itself become an attack surface. We uncover a new jailbreak attack, termed CodeSpear, that exploits GCD to induce LLMs into generating malicious code. Our experiments show that simply applying a benign code grammar constraint can effectively jailbreak LLMs. To address this vulnerability, we propose CodeShield, a safety alignment approach that robustly preserves safe behavior even under attacker-controlled grammar constraints. CodeShield aligns the model in the code modality by teaching it to generate honeypot code under GCD. Such code is semantically harmless, so it does not implement the malicious request, and structurally diverse, so it is difficult to suppress through grammar tightening. At the same time, CodeShield still preserves natural-language refusals when natural language is available. Experiments on 10 popular LLMs across 4 benchmarks show that CodeSpear outperforms representative jailbreak baselines and increases the attack success rate by more than 30 percentage points on average. CodeShield also restores safety under CodeSpear while preserving benign utility. Our findings reveal a fundamental risk of GCD and call for greater attention to its potential security implications.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Discovering Lattice Reduction Strategies via Self-Play

arXiv:2606.15301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovász (LLL) algorithm is a seminal contribution to computer science used for lattice basis reduction, yet its polynomial-time outputs produce bases that are far from optimal as the dimension grows. We show that deep reinforcement learning can discover strictly superior, generalizable reduction strategies by interacting with the primitive action space of LLL. We formulate lattice reduction as a single-player Markov Decision Process (MDP) and train a deep residual network using an AlphaZero-style self-play pipeline augmented with adaptive-horizon MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search), which couples multi-step network predictions with an entropy-gated expansion mechanism. The resulting policy, DeltaStar, is trained exclusively on small $8$-dimensional $q$-ary lattices and requires fewer primitive row operations than LLL. Crucially, it generalizes zero-shot to unseen moduli and higher dimensions up to $n=32$ without retraining.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

An AI Security Agent for University ACMIS: Multi-Vector Threat Detection and Automated Response

arXiv:2606.08270v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: University Academic Management Information Systems (ACMIS) are high-value targets for a wide spectrum of security threats including brute-force login attacks, payment fraud, privilege escalation, insider data theft, and academic integrity violations. Traditional rule-based intrusion detection systems are inadequate because many malicious activities are structurally indistinguishable from normal operations. This paper presents an AI-based security agent for ACMIS that combines supervised anomaly detection, behavioural analytics, and a natural language processing chatbot for secure password recovery. The agent monitors five operational layers: authentication, authorisation, financial transactions, user behaviour, and system health, and responds through a four-tier risk escalation framework. A modular architecture allows the core engine to be extended to other institutional systems. Experiments on a simulated ACMIS event log dataset of 147,922 sessions demonstrate a threat detection macro-average F1 of 0.966, compared to 0.156 for a rule-based baseline and 0.836 for a sequence-only (LSTM) baseline, with end-to-end critical-tier automated response latency under 1 ms on a single-node prototype. The integrated recovery chatbot achieves 97.1 percent identity verification accuracy and an 87.3 percent mass-reset attack detection rate with zero false positives on legitimate high volume recovery periods.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

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

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.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Exercise Training Improves Skeletal Muscle Insulin Sensitivity and Reprograms the Adipose Transcriptome in Heavier Monozygotic Twins

Exercise training improves skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, yet its effects on white adipose tissue remain incompletely understood. We investigated how adiposity and exercise training influence insulin-stimulated glucose uptake in skeletal muscle and abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue (ASAT), alongside adaptations in gene expression and DNA-methylation. Ten monozygotic twin pairs discordant for BMI underwent [18F]FDG-PET/CT imaging of skeletal muscle (vastus lateralis, VL) and ASAT during a euglycemic-hyperinsulinaemic clamp before and after six months of exercise training. VL and ASAT biopsies were analyzed using mRNA-sequencing and reduced representation bisulfite sequencing. Exercise training improved whole-body and VL insulin sensitivity in leaner and heavier co-twins (p

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

An Ensemble Deep Learning Approach for Reliable and Scalable Lemon Leaf Disease Classification

Early detection of plant diseases is crucial to plants and for the farmers. Plant diseases reduce fruit yield and quality, and plants are more susceptible to other stresses when they are infected. The lemon leaf disease dataset contains 1354 images. The dataset has 9 classes. Among the 9 classes only one class is for healthy leaf, and the other 8 classes are leaf diseases. The dataset was split into training (70%), testing (15%) and validation (15%) sets after comprehensive preprocessing. Two pretrained models (InceptionV3 and MobileNetV2) were applied and then combined these models using an ensemble technique to boost robustness. Ensemble models showed a promising performance of 99.27% accuracy. Adversarial Training is applied to improve models' ability and ensure reliable predictions under noisy data. Grad-CAM visualization highlights the important regions of leaf images that validate the model prediction with confidence level.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Efficient Flow Matching using Latent Variables

Flow matching models have shown great potential in image generation tasks among probabilistic generative models. However, most flow matching models in the literature do not explicitly utilize the underlying clustering structure in the target data when learning the flow from a simple source distribution like the standard Gaussian. This leads to inefficient learning, especially for many high-dimensional real-world datasets, which often reside in a low-dimensional manifold. To this end, we present $\texttt{Latent-CFM}$, which provides efficient training strategies by conditioning on the features extracted from data using pretrained deep latent variable models. Through experiments on synthetic data from multi-modal distributions and widely used image benchmark datasets, we show that $\texttt{Latent-CFM}$ exhibits improved generation quality with significantly less training and computation than state-of-the-art flow matching models by adopting pretrained lightweight latent variable models. Beyond natural images, we consider generative modeling of spatial fields stemming from physical processes. Using a 2d Darcy flow dataset, we demonstrate that our approach generates more physically accurate samples than competing approaches. In addition, through latent space analysis, we demonstrate that our approach can be used for conditional image generation conditioned on latent features, which adds interpretability to the generation process.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Looked but didn't see: inattentional blindness and yes-bias confabulation in vision-language models

Previous work showed that many participants fail to notice a gorilla in a video of people playing basketball. Another study found that 83% of trained radiologists failed to report a gorilla figure inserted into a chest CT nodule-search task, even though eye-tracking revealed that most observers had foveated the figure. We ask whether a similar phenomenon exists in contemporary vision-language models (VLMs). We find that (i) VLMs are capable of spotting the gorilla in both still-frame images and videos of lung CT scans; (ii) models display inattentional blindness, which varies according to model generation and type of stimulus presented; (iii) Gemini-3.1-Pro outperforms most other flagship and open-weight VLMs at identifying the presence or absence of the gorilla. We additionally ran a segmentation experiment utilizing two different model classes: a generalist (SAM 3), which found the gorilla but produced little to no results for anatomy-based prompts; a medical specialist (BiomedParse), which produced more promising anatomy-based results but flagged "gorilla" on gorilla-free control videos on 82% of frames. The behavioral signature of inattentional blindness reproduces in VLMs, but a unique confabulation failure mode means that any "did the model see X" claim requires signal-detection analysis with a matched-control false-alarm baseline.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Forecasting Bacterial Antimicrobial Resistance Trends Using Machine Learning on WHO GLASS Surveillance Data: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Approach for Policy Decision Support

arXiv:2602.22673v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Background: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global health threat. While the WHO Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System (GLASS) provides standardized data, population-level machine learning forecasting of resistance trends remains limited. Translating computational forecasts into policy requires transparent interpretation mechanisms. Methods: Surveillance data (2021-2023) comprising 5,909 observations across 44 countries and five WHO regions were processed. A rigorous temporal split prevented data leakage. Six models (Naive, Linear, Ridge, XGBoost, LightGBM, LSTM) were benchmarked to forecast one-year-ahead resistance rates using features including prior-year resistance and antibiotic consumption. Evaluation metrics (MAE, RMSE, sMAPE) were computed, with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals for MAE. A local Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system utilizing Gemma 4 was implemented to translate forecast findings into policy guidance grounded in retrieved WHO documents. Results: XGBoost achieved the best performance (test MAE = 6.13% [95% CI: 5.83-6.44]), an 85.3% error reduction versus the naive baseline (MAE = 41.79%). SHAP analysis identified prior-year resistance as the dominant predictor (50.5% gain), confirming strong autoregressive behavior. Regional forecast error tracked closely with surveillance coverage, ranging from 3.65% in the European Region to 8.61% in South-East Asia. The RAG pipeline generated accurate, source-attributed policy responses without fabricated citations. Conclusion: Short-term AMR resistance rates exhibit strong temporal autocorrelation that can be accurately forecasted using gradient boosting. Coupling these forecasts with a hallucination-resistant RAG system provides a scalable, evidence-based decision-support framework for AMR governance.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Surprise-Guided MergeSort: Budget-Efficient Human-in-the-Loop Ranking via Adaptive Comparison Scheduling

arXiv:2606.15623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pairwise comparison is the gold standard for subjective ranking tasks; however, exhaustive annotation requires a massive number of human comparisons ($O(n^2)$). While sorting-based methods have reduced this burden to $O(n\log n)$, they still require expensive human judgment for every single comparison. To further improve annotation efficiency, we propose leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM) not as an annotator replacement, but as a question prioritizer to identify which comparisons genuinely require human judgment. The proposed Surprise-Guided MergeSort (SGS) framework achieves this through three integrated components: (1) a bottom-up MergeSort scheduler that structures comparisons and exploits transitivity, (2) a composite Surprise Scorer – combining position-bias-cancelled VLM confidence, Elo gap, and vote entropy – to quantify comparison ambiguity, and (3) an adaptive budget allocator that routes high-surprise pairs to humans while automating low-surprise pairs via transitivity inference. Validation was conducted on six diverse benchmarks spanning text similarity (STS-B, BIOSSES, SICKR-STS) and image quality assessment (KonIQ-10k, TID2013, LIVE Challenge). SGS effectively identified and skipped up to 535 non-informative comparisons per session. Consequently, it achieved Kendall's $\tau{\times}100$ improvements of $+6$ to $+12$ over Active Elo under the same total budget. These results demonstrate that combining VLM-guided surprise metrics with algorithmic sorting provides a generally consistent accuracy-efficiency trade-off across diverse domains.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

FeatureMSEA: Metabolic Feature-based Metabolite Set Enrichment Analysis

Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) untargeted metabolomics detects thousands of metabolic features, but converting these chemical signals into metabolite set-level biological knowledge remains challenging. This is because most features lack unambiguous metabolite identities. Conventional metabolite set enrichment analysis (MSEA) generally requires identified metabolites and metabolite-level ranked inputs, leaving much of the untargeted feature space unused. Here, we present FeatureMSEA, a feature rank-based framework for metabolite set enrichment directly from metabolic features with ambiguous annotations. FeatureMSEA integrates multi-evidence feature-to-metabolite annotation, feature rank-based enrichment scoring, permutation-based inference, and iterative leading-edge-guided annotation refinement, with an optional LLM-assisted module for post-enrichment interpretation. In null comparisons of randomly split healthy samples, FeatureMSEA detected no significant metabolite sets, whereas metabolite-set spike-in simulations showed recovery of implanted signals. In a cerebrospinal fluid metabolomics study of Huntington's disease, FeatureMSEA identified dysregulated metabolite sets related to amino acid metabolism, mitochondrial energy metabolism, and neuroactive signaling. MS/MS-based annotation analysis further showed that FeatureMSEA refinement reduced annotation ambiguity and prioritized chemically consistent candidate metabolites. In summary, FeatureMSEA provides a general framework for extracting metabolite set-level biological insights from LC-MS untargeted metabolomics in which confident metabolite identification remains incomplete.

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

ComAct: Reframing Professional Software Manipulation via COM-as-Action Paradigm

Existing computer-use agents remain fundamentally limited in professional software manipulation: GUI-based agents suffer from fragile visual grounding and long-horizon error accumulation, while API-basedapproaches struggle with heterogeneous protocols and inaccessible commercial interfaces. In this work,we identify the Component Object Model (COM) as a unified executable abstraction, proposing COM-as-Action: a new paradigm that reframes professional software interaction as deterministic program synthesisrather than sequential visual control. To validate this paradigm in the most demanding environments, weintroduce ComCADBench, the first benchmark for agents operating real industrial CAD software. Ourexperiments reveal a substantial paradigm gap: frontier proprietary models achieve near-zero successunder GUI-based interaction, whereas COM-based execution yields substantial immediate gains. Tobridge the remaining gap between syntactic correctness and geometric accuracy, we develop ComActor, aself-correcting agent trained through a progressive three-stage framework, alongside ComForge, a scalableplatform for large-scale training in Windows containers. Extensive experiments show that ComActorachieves state-of-the-art performance on ComCADBench, with strong resilience in long-horizon taskswhere baselines collapse, and generalizes to external CAD benchmark.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence

We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series, including two strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models – DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T parameters (49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284B parameters (13B activated) – both supporting a context length of one million tokens. DeepSeek-V4 series incorporate several key upgrades in architecture and optimization: (1) a hybrid attention architecture that combines Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA) to improve long-context efficiency; (2) Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) that enhance conventional residual connections; (3) and the Muon optimizer for faster convergence and greater training stability. We pre-train both models on more than 32T diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by a comprehensive post-training pipeline that unlocks and further enhances their capabilities. DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max, the maximum reasoning effort mode of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks. Meanwhile, DeepSeek-V4 series are highly efficient in long-context scenarios. In the one-million-token context setting, DeepSeek-V4-Pro requires only 27% of single-token inference FLOPs and 10% of KV cache compared with DeepSeek-V3.2. This enables us to routinely support one-million-token contexts, thereby making long-horizon tasks and further test-time scaling more feasible. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Heat kernel estimates for Markov processes with blowing-up jump kernels

arXiv:2512.24807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we establish sharp two-sided heat kernel estimates for a large class of purely discontinuous symmetric Markov processes on closed subsets $F$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$, whose jump kernels blow up on a Borel subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. We assume that $F\setminus \Sigma$ is a $\kappa$-fat set and is dense in $F$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work establishing sharp heat kernel estimates for jump processes whose jump kernels blow up on part of the state space. The jump kernels under consideration take the form $J(x,y)=|x-y|^{-d-\alpha}{\mathcal B}(x,y)$, where $\alpha\in (0,2)$ and the function ${\mathcal B}(x,y)$ blows up at a subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. A fundamental obstacle is that the tails of the jump measures are not uniformly bounded, and hence standard techniques in heat kernel analysis do not provide a priori off-diagonal estimates. To overcome this difficulty, we develop a new approach based on weighted integral estimates for the heat kernel that are sensitive to both the blow-up behavior of the jump kernel and the geometry of $F\setminus \Sigma$. Examples of processes falling within our general framework include traces of isotropic $\alpha$-stable processes in $C^{1,\rm Dini}$ sets, processes in Lipschitz sets arising in connection with the nonlocal Neumann problem, and a large class of resurrected self-similar processes in the closed upper half-space.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Non-Medical COVID-19 Impacts and Hearing Status: A Global Study of Differential Health Impact Among Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing Populations

Background: Deaf and hard of hearing (HoH) experienced complex challenges during the COVID19 pandemic, including obscured visual communication from mask mandates, inaccessible public health messaging, and inadequate interpreter availability. We examined whether hearing status predicted nonmedical COVID19 impact on a global level. Methods: We conducted a nested cross-sectional analysis within a global study collecting data across two waves (April to May 2020 and July to August 2022) from 184 countries. Participants (N=7,998) were categorized as Deaf (n=304), Hard of Hearing (HoH; n=951), or Hearing (n=6,743). The primary outcome was a composite COVID-related non-medical Personal Impact TScore derived from 14 items across employment, resource access, and healthcare domains. Multinomial logistic regression models progressively adjusted for demographic, structural, and psychosocial variables. Results: Deaf participants reported substantially higher rates of pandemic-related job loss (28.9% vs. 9.6% hearing), healthcare cancellations (39.9% vs. 24.6%), and inability to obtain basic supplies. Over half (55.9%) of Deaf participants scored above the median composite impact index, compared to 39.2% of hearing participants. In the fully adjusted model, Deaf status remained an independent predictor of high non-medical impact (aOR=1.6, 95% CI: 1.1 to 2.4). HoH status showed no statistically significant difference from hearing participants in any model. Conclusions: People identifying as Deaf experienced significant disparities during COVID19 when compared with HoH or hearing people, driven by language access barriers and institutional exclusion rather than hearing loss per se. These experiences underscore the importance for systemic interventions centering on accessible communication, Deaf-centered needs, and reducing audism in Deaf-hearing interaction.

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

Enhanced Graph Neural Networks using K-Hop Gaussian Diffusion

arXiv:2606.18317v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most graph neural network (GNN) cores rely on graph convolutions, typically implemented as message passing between direct (single-hop) neighbors. In many real-world graphs, edges can be noisy or poorly defined, limiting information propagation to local neighborhoods. Existing diffusion kernels, such as Personalized PageRank (PPR) and Heat Kernel, alleviate this issue through global propagation, but still struggle with complex local structures and distant node noise. To address these limitations, we propose a K-Hop Gaussian (KHG) diffusion kernel as a preprocessing module for graph data. KHG introduces multi-hop diffusion with Gaussian weighting for remote nodes, balancing local and global information propagation before applying standard GNNs. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that KHG significantly outperforms traditional message-passing GNNs, as well as PPR and Heat Kernel diffusion, particularly in noisy or structurally complex graphs.

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

FOCUS: DLLMs Know How to Tame Their Compute Bound

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) offer a compelling alternative to Auto-Regressive models, but their deployment is constrained by high decoding cost. In this work, we identify a key inefficiency in DLLM decoding: while computation is parallelized over token blocks, only a small subset of tokens is decodable at each diffusion step, causing most compute to be wasted on non-decodable tokens. We further observe a strong correlation between attention-derived token importance and token-wise decoding probability. Based on this insight, we propose FOCUS, an inference system designed for DLLMs. By dynamically focusing computation on decodable tokens and evicting non-decodable ones on-the-fly, FOCUS increases the effective batch size, alleviating compute limitations and enabling scalable throughput. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FOCUS achieves up to 3.52$\times$ throughput improvement over the production-grade engine LMDeploy in large-batch settings, while preserving or improving generation quality across multiple benchmarks.

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

Distribution Alignment for One-Shot Federated Learning via Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.16655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One-Shot Federated Learning (OSFL) addresses extreme communication regimes in which clients interact with the server only once, amplifying the impact of heterogeneous client data distributions. In particular, the interaction of domain shift and label shift across clients induces misaligned feature representations that cannot be corrected through iterative optimization. Existing OSFL methods rely on distillation, server-side generation or ensemble-based aggregation, but assume aligned representations or address domain and label shift separately. We introduce SLOT-Align (Single-round, Learning-free Optimal Transport Alignment), a geometry-aware feature harmonization framework for OSFL. SLOT-Align uses a shared frozen encoder to extract compact feature statistics, constructs a global reference via Bures-Wasserstein barycenters, and aligns local representations using closed-form geodesic optimal transport maps. The method is computationally efficient and can be combined with existing OSFL pipelines relying on frozen encoders without modifying their training procedures. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks, pretrained backbones, and OSFL methods show that SLOT-Align consistently improves accuracy and robustness under joint domain and label shift.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Global Variational Learning for Quantum Error Correction

arXiv:2606.08592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient quantum error correction is essential for the advancement of quantum computing. We propose a quantum neural network with a global structure that reduces the number of unitary matrices required in quantum circuits. This approach resulted in a 97% reduction in training time and up to a 25% improvement in the training completion rate, ultimately achieving a 100% success rate in training while surpassing the error correction performance reported in previous studies. In addition, we demonstrated the enhanced robustness of quantum error correction against internal network noise. Moreover, the fidelity of quantum error correction under internal network noise increased by up to 15% due to the reduced computational load.

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

Dual-Constrained Diffusion Image Compression for Operational Rate-Distortion-Perception Optimization

The rate-distortion-perception (RDP) trade-off extends classical rate–distortion theory by imposing a distributional constraint on reconstructions, providing a unified framework for neural image compression that jointly governs fidelity and perceptual realism. While prior work achieves near-optimal rate–perception trade-offs, practical frameworks explicitly realizing the full RDP surface remain scarce, primarily due to the difficulty of introducing common randomness at the decoder. We propose DCIC (Dual-Constrained Diffusion Image Compression), which integrates a learned codec with a diffusion-based decoder governed by joint distortion and idempotence constraints. The distortion constraint bounds reconstruction fidelity relative to the base codec output; the idempotence constraint – requiring that re-encoding the restored image recovers the base codec reconstruction – serves as a tractable surrogate for the distributional perception requirement. Together, they steer the reverse denoising process via iterative optimization with consistent noise injection, realizing common randomness without additional rate overhead. At fixed rate, dual attenuation factors $(K_D, K_P)$ jointly navigate the Pareto frontier of the distortion-perception plane, enabling continuously adjustable fidelity-realism trade-offs from a single bitstream. DCIC$_{RD}$ ($K_P{=}0$) and DCIC$_{RP}$ ($K_D{=}0$) arise as boundary curves, with DCIC$_{RDP}$ ($K_D = K_P=1$) realizing the optimal interior operating point. Experiments on CelebA-HQ, CLIC2020, and ImageNet-1K across CNN, Transformer, and hybrid architectures confirm that DCIC$_{RDP}$ achieves superior BD-PSNR over all perceptual codecs, while DCIC$_{RP}$ matches dedicated perception-oriented methods in BD-FID, validating the practical value of full RDP surface navigation.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

When Good Verifiers Go Bad: Self-Improving VLMs Can Regress on New Tasks

作者:

arXiv:2606.14629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verifier-driven self-DPO is a common recipe for self-improving production visual-language models. In this setup, a frozen verifier scores candidate generations, the top- and bottom-scoring candidates form a preference example, and DPO updates the learner. The deployment-time assumption is monotone: a stronger verifier should yield a stronger student. We show that this assumption can fail because verifier quality is highly task-specific. On a four-rung open-source verifier ladder across MathVista, MMMU, and BLINK, the same verifiers that are above-threshold and improve a Qwen-3-VL-2B student on MathVista become sub-threshold on MMMU, where their task-rubric accuracy drops to 8% to 23%. In this regime, every verifier we tested silently regresses the student, producing drops of 3.4 to 10.9 percentage points below the frozen baseline while the DPO training loss continues to decrease. The regression replicates on a second student, Qwen-2.5-VL-3B. Moreover, within the failure regime, damage is confidence-inverted: the more accurate-but-still-wrong verifier causes larger regression than a near-random verifier, suggesting that progress-gated replay amplifies confidently wrong preference pairs. We give a compact mechanistic explanation via a variance theorem for progress-gated replay and its direction-mismatch failure mode. The deployment message is operational rather than purely diagnostic: before running any verifier-driven loop, teams should measure target-task rubric accuracy, rank verifiers by target-task rubric quality rather than parameter count, and treat diminishing returns in above-threshold regimes as a verifier-side compute budget cap.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Efficient Reinforcement Learning by Guiding World Models with Non-Curated Data

arXiv:2502.19544v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Leveraging offline data is a promising way to improve the sample efficiency of online reinforcement learning (RL). This paper expands the pool of usable data for offline-to-online RL by leveraging abundant non-curated data that is reward-free, of mixed quality, and collected across multiple embodiments. Although learning a world model appears promising for utilizing such data, we find that naive fine-tuning fails to accelerate RL training on many tasks. Through careful investigation, we attribute this failure to the distributional shift between offline and online data during fine-tuning. To address this issue and effectively use the offline data, we propose two techniques: i) experience rehearsal and ii) execution guidance. With these modifications, the non-curated offline data substantially improves RL's sample efficiency. Under limited sample budgets, our method achieves nearly twice the aggregate score of learning-from-scratch baselines across 72 visuomotor tasks spanning 6 embodiments. On challenging tasks such as locomotion and robotic manipulation, it outperforms prior methods that utilize offline data by a decent margin.