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) 2026-06-16

Structure-Semantic Co-optimized Latent Diffusion Model for Fast Visual Anagram Synthesis

Visual anagram is an intriguing form of art creation wherein a single image presents different conceptual interpretations under transformations such as flipping or rotation. Recent work has achieved visual anagram synthesis by leveraging pretrained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, yet still suffers from several key limitations including computational inefficiency, suboptimal aesthetic quality, and weak semantic fidelity and expressiveness. This work focuses on generating visual anagrams with substantially improved visual quality at minimal computational cost, thereby advancing intelligent creation of illusionary digital art. To increase image resolution while reducing time overhead, we adapt the cutting-edge parallel denoising algorithm from pixel-based T2I model to the adversarially distilled latent-based one, and accordingly propose a structure-semantic co-optimization (S2CO) framework to counteract the consequent visual degradation. As the core of our approach, S2CO framework comprises three key innovations: (\romannumeral1) null-text structure alignment optimization; (\romannumeral2) semantic enhancement optimization; (\romannumeral3) attention-guided noise fusion. Building upon these components, our method dubbed S2CO-Anagram is able to generate higher-resolution anagram images with noticeably superior visual harmony and semantic faithfulness than related SOTA approaches, all while achieving substantially faster inference speed. Code will be publicly available.

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

AdaPLD: Adaptive Retrieval and Reuse for Efficient Model-Free Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding accelerates generation by verifying multiple drafted tokens in a single target-model forward pass, reducing sequential decoding iterations. Model-free variants avoid auxiliary draft models by reusing text and model states already available during generation, but their speedup depends on the reliability of the constructed drafts. We identify two limitations of existing reuse-based methods: lexically anchored retrieval has limited recall under surface-form variation, and deterministic span copying can be brittle when the retrieved context does not uniquely determine the continuation. We propose AdaPLD, a training-free method that adaptively improves both retrieval and draft construction. AdaPLD preserves high-precision lexical reuse while using semantic similarity to recover additional reuse opportunities when lexical matching fails. It further constructs branched reuse hypotheses to account for continuation uncertainty, rather than relying on a single copied span. Across diverse benchmarks, AdaPLD reduces target-model forward passes and achieves up to $3.10\times$ decoding speedup.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A unified complexity bound for logconcave sampling

arXiv:2606.12694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a simple, unified, and nearly tight bound for sampling arbitrary logconcave distributions from a warm start using the In-and-Out algorithm along with exponential lifting. The main new ingredient in the analysis is an improved bound on the Poincaré constant of a lifted distribution. As a consequence, the resulting convergence rate is nearly tight for both constrained settings (e.g., Gaussian restricted to a convex body) and well-conditioned settings (e.g., strongly logconcave and smooth densities).

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

ProtAff: Protein Binding Affinity Prediction via LoRA-Finetuned ESM-2

Predicting the binding affinity of protein–protein interactions remains a central challenge in computational biology. Structure prediction models such as AlphaFold3 (AF3) and Boltz-2 can produce high-quality docking poses, and their confidence scores indicate structure quality, but these same scores fail to rank binding affinity among confirmed binders. Here we present ProtAff, a sequence-only affinity prediction model built on ESM-2 (650M parameters) with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning and a cross-attention module. ProtAff is trained using a margin ranking loss on 362,567 affinity measurements spanning 20 heterogeneous data sources, and we removed all training samples whose target sequence exceeds 50% similarity to the test target EGFR. On the AdaptyvBio EGFR benchmark (N = 55), ProtAff achieves a Spearman correlation coefficient {rho} = 0.413, outperforming the best AF3 metric ({rho} = 0.054), the best Boltz-2 metric ({rho} = -0.046), and ML-based predictors MINT ({rho} = 0.242) and CrossAffinity ({rho} = 0.216). Applied to the AdaptyvBio Nipah virus binder design competition, a pipeline incorporating ProtAff for affinity ranking produced a design with KD = 0.132 nM (2 of 5 designs confirmed binding), a 2.8-fold improvement over the competition winner. On a cross-target discrimination benchmark of 91 VHH-antigen crystal structures, ProtAff underperforms structural methods for distinguishing cognate from non-cognate pairings, indicating that sequence-based affinity models are effective for within-target ranking but not for cross-target specificity.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

AliceDB database and pipeline for identification of natural protein variants based on mass spectrometry measurement data

The natural variation that distinguishes living organisms within a single species is currently being studied intensively, primarily at the genetic level. Unfortunately, studies of natural variants at the level of protein gene products are not very common, mainly due to the lack of appropriate databases and bioinformatics tools. The main research technique used to study proteomes/peptidomes is mass spectrometry (MS). A classic method for interpreting raw mass spectrometry data in proteomic/peptidomic studies involves the use of databases containing representative (canonical) sequences that define the proteome of the organism under study. In this paper, we present the AliceDB database, which contains information on over 7 million natural variants of protein sequences described in the scientific literature for Homo sapiens. The data contained in the AliceDB database can be utilized using widely available and commonly used software for interpreting proteomic data. Test results regarding the use of the AliceDB database for the interpretation of proteomic data indicate that accounting for the presence of natural variants increases both the number and quality of identified proteins. Furthermore, it is easy to identify protein sequence variants that may, for example, be of significance in medicine.

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

GAS-Leak-LLM: Genetic Algorithm-Based Suffix Optimization for Black-Box LLM Jailbreaking

arXiv:2606.15788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) constitute pivotal components within the AI-dominated information technology ecosystem. To mitigate risks associated with harmful or policy-violating outputs, commercial systems employ advanced alignment strategies and multi-layered content moderation mechanisms. Despite these safeguards, recent research has demonstrated that LLMs remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, particularly through jailbreaking and prompt injection techniques. In this work, we propose GAS-Leak-LLM a novel jailbreaking attack based on a genetic algorithm that systematically evolves adversarial suffix to bypass safety constraints. Operating in a strict black-box setting, our method requires no access to model parameters or internals, thereby reflecting realistic threat scenarios in deployed systems. Through the iterative application of selection, mutation, and crossover heuristics, the framework systematically explores the discrete prompt space to identify high-fitness adversarial suffixes. Empirical findings reveal critical shortcomings in existing safety enforcement mechanisms and confirm the effectiveness and practical viability of the proposed attack.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Testing the problem of time with cold atoms

arXiv:2509.07745v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We realize a cold-atom system to quantitatively test relational constructions of time. A well-isolated atomic Bose-Einstein condensate evolves in a conservative trap that is partitioned by a thin optical barrier into an observed and unobserved sector, with negligible dissipation on the experimental timescale. Motivated by relational-time approaches discussed in the Wheeler-DeWitt framework, we ask whether the dynamics of the observed sector can be ordered using only internal degrees of freedom. To this end, we construct an entropic time from an experimentally defined coarse-grained entropy, and demonstrate that it can robustly order the events in the observed sector across repeated cycles of expansion and recollapse. We finally derive an effective Schroedinger equation parameterized by this internal time and show that it is able to reproduce the measured evolution. These results establish a controlled experimental setting in which relational-time constructions can be quantitatively tested.

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

LoComposition: Terrain-Adaptive Energy-Efficient Quadruped Locomotion without Gait Priors

arXiv:2606.15896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning-based quadrupedal locomotion typically relies on complex reward formulations that entangle task specification, operational limits, gait preference, and terrain adaptation within a single optimization objective. We instead treat these functions through distinct mechanisms: rewards for task specification, constraints for operational limits, energy minimization for gait preference, and exteroceptive perception for adapting energy use to terrain difficulty. We show that these components jointly enable efficient, terrain-adaptive locomotion, and that removing each component exposes a distinct failure mode. Our formulation removes explicit gait priors (including air-time, contact-count, and foot-clearance targets) in favor of emergent behavior. Compared to a conventional complex-reward baseline, our formulation achieves comparable terrain traversal while reducing cost of transport by 56% and operational-limit violations by 96%. The resulting policies transfer zero-shot to a physical Unitree Go2 using LiDAR-based elevation mapping. Project website with videos: https://tinyurl.com/locomposition.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Controlled Comparison of Machine Learning Models for Fault Classification and Localization in Power System Protection

arXiv:2510.00831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasing complexity of modern power systems, driven by the integration of inverter-based and distributed energy resources, challenges the reliability of conventional protection schemes and motivates the use of machine learning for protection tasks. However, published results are often difficult to compare because datasets, sensing assumptions, and decision horizons vary across studies. This paper presents a controlled comparison of machine learning models for fault classification (FC) and fault localization (FL) under identical sensing, timing, and validation conditions on a common electromagnetic transient dataset, using decision windows of 10-50 ms to reflect protection-relevant time scales. For FC, the best-performing nonlinear models achieve F1 scores above 0.98 already at 10 ms, while lower-capacity models degrade at shorter horizons but improve with longer windows, indicating that relevant fault-type information is already present in the earliest transient. For FL, the top-performing models reach a stable localization error of about 10 % of normalized line length across all evaluated horizons, while weaker models form a clearly separated second performance tier. Line-resolved analysis shows that localization accuracy varies across grid segments, indicating topology-dependent difficulty rather than insufficient temporal context alone. These findings provide a controlled reference for comparing machine learning models across two protection tasks with fundamentally different information requirements.

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

Beyond IGO-Flow: Toward Convergence Analysis of IGO in Continuous Spaces

arXiv:2606.17523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information-Geometric Optimization (IGO) provides a unified framework for black-box optimization by interpreting the adaptation of a search distribution as a natural gradient update. Despite its conceptual importance, the convergence theory of IGO remains limited: most existing results concern continuous-time idealizations such as the IGO flow, rather than discrete-time updates with non-infinitesimal learning rates. In this paper, we study discrete-time IGO in continuous spaces, formulated as natural gradient updates in the expectation-parameter coordinates of an exponential family. In particular, we analyze IGO over the multivariate Gaussian family on strongly convex quadratic objective functions. Our analysis covers a setting that simultaneously incorporates full covariance adaptation, a fixed positive learning rate, and quantile-based weights. In this setting, we prove that the covariance matrix converges to the zero matrix. We further show that the mean vector converges to the global optimum, provided that the condition number of the appropriately scaled covariance matrix is bounded at sufficiently frequent iterations. These results advance the convergence theory of IGO and help bridge the gap between the mathematical theory of IGO and practical covariance-adaptive search methods such as CMA-ES.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Silhouette-Guided Animal Art

Generative AI has advanced the ability to render photorealistic or artistic images, yet it remains limited in a key aspect of human creativity: interpreting ambiguous shapes. This phenomenon, rooted in pareidolia, allows humans to perceive meaningful forms in random patterns such as clouds, stones, or leaves. To computationally replicate this imaginative process, we introduce Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Visual-RAG), a framework that generates animal art directly from natural silhouettes. Our method retrieves structurally similar animal shapes from a curated corpus of 28,586 high-quality silhouettes and uses them as reference exemplars to guide diffusion-based generation with ControlNet and IP-Adapter. Ablation studies confirm that shape Context with RANSAC provides the most accurate alignment, while removing shape standardization reduces the inlier ratio to just 13.4\%, underscoring the importance of structural fidelity in Visual-RAG. A user study with 12 participants evaluated the outputs in terms of aesthetics, silhouette fidelity, and overall impression. Results reveal that while Visual-RAG provides plausible interpretations, challenges remain in achieving high perceptual impact. This work lays the foundation for computational pareidolia, showing how machines can contribute to the early stages of imaginative discovery.

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

QALM: Escaping Local Minima via Interleaved Exploration and Exploitation in Quantum Circuit Optimization

arXiv:2606.16221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum circuit optimizers face a fundamental limitation in how they tolerate temporary cost increases. At one extreme, greedy rule-based optimizers immediately apply any cost-reducing transformation, achieving high efficiency but quickly becoming trapped in local minima. At the other extreme, search-based optimizers accept cost-increasing moves to explore the circuit space and escape such minima. However, because search-based optimizers cannot determine within a reasonable time budget whether a given point is promising, that is, whether its neighborhood contains a deeper local minimum, they must blindly explore higher-cost regions. As a result, escaping the current basin to reach a promising point takes exponentially many steps. In this work, we show that this limitation can be overcome with a hybrid framework that interleaves the exhaustive exploration capabilities of search algorithms with the efficiency of rule-based optimization. We implement this framework as QALM, a novel optimizer designed to escape local minima without incurring the runtime penalties of pure search. Crucially, our results demonstrate that QALM does not merely strike a balance; it outperforms existing rule-based and search-based optimizers in circuit reduction rates while operating with the computational efficiency of rule-based systems. In a comprehensive evaluation across 248 circuits, QALM matches or exceeds the fidelity of the strongest baseline on 83.9% of these circuits, given the same time budget.

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

Beyond Rebalancing: Benchmarking Binary Classifiers Under Class Imbalance Without Rebalancing Techniques

arXiv:2509.07605v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class imbalance poses a significant challenge to supervised classification, particularly in critical domains like medical diagnostics and anomaly detection where minority class instances are rare. While numerous studies have explored rebalancing techniques to address this issue, less attention has been given to evaluating the performance of binary classifiers under imbalance when no such techniques are applied. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess the performance of binary classifiers "as-is", without performing any explicit rebalancing. Specifically, we systematically evaluate the robustness of a diverse set of binary classifiers across both real-world and synthetic datasets, under progressively reduced minority class sizes, using one-shot and few-shot scenarios as baselines. Our approach also explores varying data complexities through synthetic decision boundary generation to simulate real-world conditions. In addition to standard classifiers, we include experiments using undersampling, oversampling strategies, and one-class classification (OCC) methods to examine their behavior under severe imbalance. The results confirm that classification becomes more difficult as data complexity increases and the minority class size decreases. While traditional classifiers deteriorate under extreme imbalance, advanced models like TabPFN and boosting-based ensembles retain relatively higher performance and better generalization compared to traditional classifiers. Visual interpretability and evaluation metrics further validate these findings. Our work offers valuable guidance on model selection for imbalanced learning, providing insights into classifier robustness without dependence on explicit rebalancing techniques.

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

A Zero-shot Generalized Graph Anomaly Detection Framework via Node Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.12673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-domain graph anomaly detection (GAD) aims to identify abnormal nodes in unseen target graphs, showing strong potential in real-world applications with heterogeneous graph data. However, existing methods often depend on dataset-specific feature semantics and structural patterns, which limits their ability to generalize across different domains. To address this challenge, we propose AlignGAD, a zero-shot generalized graph anomaly detection framework. Our framework is built upon three key components: a Global Unification Module that aligns heterogeneous node features and normalizes graph signals in the spectral domain; a Clustering Module that constructs cluster-aware graph views to capture group-level abnormal patterns; and a Node Discrepancy Scoring Module that measures reconstruction discrepancy and aggregates anomaly evidence from different graph views. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AlignGAD under the zero-shot GAD setting.

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

Learning Topology-Aware Implicit Field for Unified Pulmonary Tree Modeling with Incomplete Topological Supervision

Pulmonary trees extracted from CT images frequently exhibit topological incompleteness, such as missing or disconnected branches, which substantially degrades downstream anatomical analysis and limits the applicability of existing pulmonary tree modeling pipelines. Current approaches typically rely on dense volumetric processing, explicit graph reasoning, or generic point cloud completion priors, leading to limited efficiency, weak structural awareness, and reduced robustness under realistic structural corruption. We propose TopoField, a topology-aware implicit modeling framework that treats topology repair as a first-class modeling problem and enables unified multi-task inference for pulmonary tree analysis. TopoField represents pulmonary anatomy using sparse surface and skeleton point clouds and learns a continuous implicit field that supports topology repair without relying on complete or explicit disconnection annotations, by training on synthetically introduced structural disruptions over already incomplete trees. Building upon the repaired implicit representation, anatomical labeling and lung segment reconstruction are jointly inferred through task-specific implicit functions within a single forward pass. Extensive experiments on the Lung3D+ dataset demonstrate that TopoField consistently improves topological completeness and achieves accurate anatomical labeling and lung segment reconstruction under challenging incomplete scenarios. We further validate TopoField on real incomplete outputs from an external segmentation model, demonstrating its applicability to realistic segmentation pipelines. Owing to its implicit formulation, TopoField attains high computational efficiency, completing all tasks in just over one second per case, highlighting its practicality for large-scale and time-sensitive clinical applications.

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

ParseFixer: An Agentic Framework for Document Parsing via Selective Multimodal Correction

In this report, we present our third-place solution for the DataMFM Challenge Track 1: Document Parsing. This track requires models to recover structured Markdown documents from document page images while preserving textual content and document structure. To address the complementary requirements of accurate content recovery and faithful structure reconstruction, we propose ParseFixer, an agentic framework for backbone parsing and selective correction. ParseFixer consists of two key modules: Full-Page Backbone Parsing (FBP) and Agentic Selective Correction (ASC). FBP produces stable initial Markdown outputs with MinerU2.5 Pro, while ASC detects high-value parsing failures and repairs them through a verify-and-rollback correction process. By placing selective multimodal correction after open-source backbone parsing, ParseFixer improves the recovery of key document elements without rewriting reliable backbone predictions. On the test set, our final system achieves an overall score of 61.78 and ranks third in Track 1, demonstrating its effectiveness for accurate document parsing. Our code will be released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/CVPRW26-ParseFixer.

18.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

A lactylation- and autophagy-associated prognostic signature reveals LSEC-derived CLEC3B as a novel mediator of hepatocellular carcinoma suppression

作者:

by Youai Song, Yinkuan Ning, Meihui Li, Jianwei Lan, Liangchen Lei, Yufei Han, Zhuo Meng, Binjie Li, Pengpeng Liu, Quanyan Liu The crosstalk between lactylation and autophagy within the hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) microenvironment is a burgeoning field with profound implications. By integrating multi-omics data from public cohorts, we delineated two molecular subtypes of HCC with divergent clinical outcomes and established a lactylation-autophagy-related prognostic signature. This signature highlighted CLEC3B as a pivotal gene. Subsequent single-cell RNA sequencing and experimental validation unequivocally pinpointed liver sinusoidal endothelial cells (LSECs) as the principal cellular source of CLEC3B, which was significantly downregulated in HCC tissues. Functionally, conditioned media derived from CLEC3B-overexpressing LSECs potently inhibited HCC cell proliferation. Mechanistic investigations revealed that this tumor-suppressive effect was orchestrated through the concurrent suppression of autophagy and diminution of lactylation levels. Our findings position LSEC-secreted CLEC3B as a novel metabolic mediator in HCC, bridging two key pathways in tumor suppression, and endorse its clinical value both as a prognostic indicator and a promising therapeutic target.

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

ZipSplat: Fewer Gaussians, Better Splats

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting methods reconstruct a scene from posed or pose-free images in a single forward pass, yet current approaches predict one Gaussian per input pixel, tying the representation budget to camera resolution rather than scene complexity. A flat wall and a richly textured object thus produce equally many Gaussians despite very different geometric needs. We propose ZipSplat, a token-based feed-forward model that decouples Gaussian placement from the pixel grid. A multi-view backbone extracts dense visual tokens, and k-means clustering compresses them into a compact set of scene tokens. Cross- and self-attention refine these tokens, and a lightweight MLP decodes each into a group of Gaussians with unconstrained 3D positions. Because clustering is applied at inference, a single trained model spans the quality-efficiency curve without retraining. ZipSplat operates without ground-truth poses or intrinsics, yet sets a new state of the art on DL3DV and RealEstate10K with ${\sim}6{\times}$ fewer Gaussians than pixel-aligned methods, surpassing the best pose-free baseline by 2.1dB and 1.2dB PSNR, respectively. It further generalizes zero-shot to Mip-NeRF360 and ScanNet++, outperforming all comparable baselines. Our project page is at https://veichta.com/zipsplat.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

FedBiCross: Personalized One-Shot Federated Learning on Medical Images

arXiv:2601.01901v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation-based one-shot federated learning (OSFL) trains a model in a single communication round without sharing raw data, making OSFL attractive for privacy-sensitive medical applications. However, existing methods aggregate predictions from all clients to form a global teacher. Under non-IID data, conflicting predictions dilute each other during averaging, yielding less informative soft labels that weaken distillation. We propose FedBiCross, a personalized OSFL framework with three stages: (1) clustering clients by model output similarity to form coherent sub-ensembles, (2) bi-level cross-cluster optimization that learns adaptive weights to selectively leverage beneficial cross-cluster knowledge while suppressing negative transfer, and (3) personalized distillation for client-specific adaptation. Experiments on four medical image datasets demonstrate that FedBiCross consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across different non-IID degrees.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

DEFINED: A Data-Efficient Computational Framework for Fine-Grained Creativity Assessment in Debate Scenarios

Human creativity has emerged as a critical competency in the era of large language models. Assessing creativity in complex, open-ended environments is a grand challenge in data mining, currently hindered by a reliance on standardized simple tasks and the scarcity of fine-grained expert data. As an ecologically valid assessment context, debate reflects multiple dimensions of creativity, encompassing both divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Moreover, debate is a data-rich domain, with a large volume of publicly accessible materials. Current mainstream automated scoring methods are poorly suited to complex settings such as debate, and therefore still rely on costly human evaluation. To this end, this paper proposes DEFINED, a data-efficient computational framework for fine-grained creativity assessment in debate scenarios. DEFINED operationalizes debate creativity through a hierarchical eight-dimensional metric system, implemented via a pre-trained autoregressive language model with a hierarchical scoring head that supports both fine-grained and coarse-grained evaluation. Statements and their associated expert scores were obtained from authentic debate competitions, and a constrained data augmentation strategy was employed to address the elite bias inherent in the original data. DEFINED adopts a mixed-granularity training strategy enabling robust learning from limited fine-grained supervision annotated by trained graduate experts. To rigorously validate ecological validity beyond synthetic benchmarks, we incorporate an empirical study with debate-naive participants, utilizing these authentic data to serve as a qualitative case study for mid-to-low proficiency populations. Across our evaluation protocol, our scoring model achieves accurate and stable scoring, outperforming prompt-based large language model evaluators and existing debate scoring methods.

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

Algorithmic Constitutionalism

arXiv:2606.12437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing encroachment of artificial intelligence (AI) on social life raises significant risks for society, particularly within the infospheres created and controlled by companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. This article examines these risks through an in-depth analysis of Facebook's content moderation regime, which is already partially governed by algorithms. We argue that the idea of ethical engineering, often proposed in the literature as a solution to the governance challenges posed by AI, is inadequate for several reasons. In response, we develop an alternative framework, which we term "algorithmic constitutionalism." Our approach rests on three pillars: (a) a layered architecture consisting of two levels of code: (i) an operative or object level and (ii) a meta level designed to protect the system's core principles from algorithmically initiated change; (b) algorithmic meta-reasoning, which enables the system to operate simultaneously at both levels so that it can monitor, verify, and potentially correct in real time operations at the object level that depart from principles protected at the meta-code level; and (c) correction through deliberation. The article elaborates the concept of algorithmic constitutionalism and demonstrates how it may be applied to Facebook's content moderation regime. As part of this analysis, we examine the tension between societal constitutionalism and algorithmic constitutionalism. Paradoxically, attempts to subject AI systems to external deliberative control may also enable AI agents to intervene in that process, potentially undermining its purpose. The article concludes by considering the implications of this argument for the European Digital Services Act, which entered into force in October 2022.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ICA Lens: Interpreting Language Models Without Training Another Dictionary

Finding interpretable directions in language-model representations is critical for understanding and controlling model behavior. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become the standard tool for this purpose, but using them as the default first lens often requires training, storing, and evaluating large overcomplete dictionaries. This bottleneck limits rapid exploration and raises a fundamental question: how much interpretable structure is already visible from activation geometry before training another neural dictionary? Our intuition is simple: many interpretable directions are selective on tokens, and these directions should look less Gaussian than random directions. We therefore revisit independent component analysis (ICA), a classical method for finding non-Gaussian directions, as a compact lens for language-model interpretability. We find that ICA has been underestimated for LLM interpretability, because prior uses often relied on off-the-shelf ICA implementations that are brittle on LLM activations and lacked systematic tools for inspecting and evaluating the recovered directions. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ICALens, the first practical workflow for stable, efficient, and auditable ICA analysis of LLM representations. It combines an optimized GPU-parallel FastICA pipeline with LLM-specific stability recipes and better fitting diagnostics, enabling efficient and reliable layer-wise analysis. Across GPT-2 Small, Gemma 2 2B, and Qwen 3.5 2B Base, ICALens efficiently recovers compact, human-interpretable directions without per-layer gradient-based dictionary training. On SAEBench, ICA is competitive with public SAEs in sparse probing and outperforms them in targeted probe perturbation under small-to-medium budgets. These results suggest that ICA should not be viewed as a weak baseline, but as an efficient and complementary first lens for exploring language-model representations.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Vision-language models for chest radiography do not always need the image

Medical vision-language models report strong chest radiograph accuracy, and this is increasingly read as evidence that they use the image. That inference is unsafe: a model exploiting finding-name priors scores like one that reads the scan, and no standard benchmark separates them. We introduce a causal audit that intervenes on the image, occluding the relevant region, occluding an irrelevant one, and swapping in another patient's same-label scan, and combines three behavioral metrics to test whether a correct answer depends on the image. Across nine systems, a text-only model with no image access reaches within 5.7 accuracy points of the best multimodal one, and a 119-billion-parameter multimodal model is statistically indistinguishable from a 7-billion text-only baseline. The audit splits the cohort into three models that ignore the image, one that is unstable, and five that use it selectively, for a subset of findings; the categories hold across a second dataset, resolution, and prompt phrasing. Against board-certified radiologists, a text-only model is statistically indistinguishable from a radiologist's accuracy while grounding at zero, whereas the image-using models ground at radiologist-comparable rates. Reported confidence flags ungrounded answers only when a model uses the image. Grounding audits, not accuracy, should gate clinical deployment.