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.CL) 2026-06-16

PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions

Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Probing Many-Body Phenomena with Atomically Thin Nuclear Spin Layers in Diamond

arXiv:2510.27374v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum simulation aims to recreate complex many-body phenomena in controlled environments, offering insights into dynamics that are otherwise difficult to model. Existing platforms, however, are often complex and costly to scale, typically requiring ultra pure vacuum or low temperatures. Here, we introduce a platform based on a thin, strongly interacting ${}^{13}C$ nuclear spin layer in diamond that allows controlled exploration of many-body dynamics at room temperature. Nearby nitrogen-vacancy centers enable polarization, readout, and, combined with radio-frequency fields, coherent control of the nuclear spins. We demonstrate strong, tunable interactions among the nuclear spins and use the system to probe discrete time-crystalline order across varying interaction ranges. By combining ease of use with operation at ambient temperatures, our work opens new opportunities for investigating strongly correlated many-body effects.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Power-law-graded Ising Interactions Stabilize Time Crystals Realizing Quantum Energy Storage and Sensing

arXiv:2508.14847v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study discrete time-crystalline (DTC) phases in one-dimensional spin-1/2 chains with power-law-graded Ising interactions under periodic Floquet driving. By generalizing Stark localization to power-law-graded Ising interaction profiles, we identify robust period-doubled dynamics across a wide range of interaction exponents, stabilized by the interplay between coherent driving and spatially varying coupling. Within the DTC phase, the energy stored in the system, interpreted as a quantum battery, increases superlinearly with system size, although no scaling advantage persists in normalized power. Beyond energy storage, we demonstrate that the DTC phase supports enhanced quantum sensing. The quantum Fisher information associated with estimating timing deviations in the drive scales superextensively with system size, surpassing the Heisenberg limit. The degree of quantum advantage can be tuned by varying the interaction exponent, though DTC behavior remains robust throughout. Our results position power-law-graded Ising interacting Floquet systems as robust platforms for storing quantum energy and achieving metrological enhancement.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

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

Information Gap and Feasibility-Aware Inference in Binomial Logistic Mixtures

arXiv:2606.15665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies the information gap between mixture detection and label recovery in binomial logistic mixtures. Standard likelihood-based criteria such as the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) can detect the presence of two components, but this does not guarantee that the corresponding labels are recoverable. We show that this gap is intrinsic to binomial logistic mixtures with a fixed number of trials: observed-data evidence for mixture structure and per-observation information for label recovery have different local orders in the component separation, and only the former accumulates with the sample size. As a result, there exists a detectable-but-unrecoverable regime in which BIC selects two components while the posterior labels remain essentially uninformative. To address this issue, we propose two feasibility-aware inference procedures: a recoverability-aware BIC with a posterior-entropy penalty and an entropy-regularized estimator that mitigates the tendency of the maximum likelihood estimator to produce overly separated components and overly concentrated posterior responsibilities. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted gap and demonstrate that the proposed methods avoid misleading component selections and improve the calibration of posterior label probabilities.

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

Concept Flow Models: Anchoring Concept-Based Reasoning with Hierarchical Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance interpretability by projecting learned features into a human-understandable concept space. Recent approaches leverage vision-language models to generate concept embeddings, reducing the need for manual concept annotations. However, these models suffer from a critical limitation: as the number of concepts approaches the embedding dimension, information leakage increases, enabling the model to exploit spurious or semantically irrelevant correlations and undermining interpretability. In this work, we propose Concept Flow Models (CFMs), which replace the flat bottleneck with a hierarchical, concept-driven decision tree. Each internal node in the hierarchy focuses on a localized subset of discriminative concepts, progressively narrowing the prediction scope. Our framework constructs decision hierarchies from visual embeddings, distributes semantic concepts at each hierarchy level, and trains differentiable concept weights through probabilistic tree traversal. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that CFMs match the predictive performance of flat CBMs, while substantially mitigating information leakage by reducing effective concept usage. Furthermore, CFMs yield stepwise decision flows that enable transparent and auditable model reasoning with hierarchical class structures.

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

Bridging Geographic Bias in Urban Streetscape Inference via Lifelong Learning with Visual-Semantic Pivoting

作者:

Visual perception of urban streetscapes underpins evidence-based decisions in landscape planning, public health, and place-making. Yet models trained on a few well-photographed metropolises systematically misjudge underrepresented districts, propagating geographic bias into downstream policy. We address this gap with HVSP-LL, a lifelong learning framework that couples a stratified visual-semantic pivoting module with an equity-aware rehearsal mechanism. The pivoting module organises landscape concepts along a three-tier ontology (macro structure, meso composition, micro element) and aligns image features to learnable semantic anchors at each tier, providing transferable representations that resist distributional drift. The lifelong adaptation component sequentially absorbs new urban regions while constraining inter-region perception gaps through a worst-region sample-reweighting objective and a structurally-aware exemplar buffer. We evaluate HVSP-LL on a panoramic streetscape benchmark assembled from twelve cities across four continents and seven perceptual dimensions. The framework attains 0.834 Spearman correlation on the held-out city sequence, an absolute 6.1 point improvement over the strongest continual baseline, and shrinks the inter-city perception gap to 0.094 – a 38% reduction relative to the strongest continual baseline (0.151) and a 57% reduction relative to a representative regularisation baseline (0.218). Ablations confirm that each tier of the pivoting hierarchy contributes monotonically, and the equity-aware rehearsal converts mean backward transfer from -0.038 (without retention) to +0.013, eliminating catastrophic forgetting on the held-out sequence. Our results indicate that hierarchical anchoring is a practical pathway toward geographically equitable streetscape inference at city scale.

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

Generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian for Projective Quantum Feature Maps

arXiv:2606.13641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Projected quantum feature maps provide a strategy for using quantum processors as feature generators for classical machine-learning models. Building on counterdiabatic Ising-glass and one-dimensional Heisenberg PQFMs, we introduce a generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian-based PQFM that provides a unified way to encode classical features through local Pauli fields and pairwise two-qubit Pauli interactions. This construction allows distinct classical variables to be embedded along different Pauli axes of the same qubit, increasing the information density of shallow circuits while remaining compatible with hardware constraints. We develop and implement these methods in pqfmlib, a publicly available Python library for constructing, executing, and benchmarking Hamiltonian-based PQFMs.We then benchmark the generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs against reference PQFMs on four biomedical classification datasets under a nested cross-validation protocol with paired statistical tests. Quantum features are generated using both IBM quantum processors with up to 156 qubits and statevector simulations. Our results show that the generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian family provides the most consistent pattern of statistically supported gains over matched classical baselines, although the performance of all methods depends on the dataset, encoding strategy, measured observables, and hardware conditions. These findings support generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs as a promising route toward near-term quantum utility.

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

Bounding Boxes as Goals: Language-Conditioned Grasping via Neuro-Symbolic Planning

For robotics to be effectively integrated into household or industrial environments, machines must adapt to natural-language prompts in real time. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled zero-shot generalization in robot task and motion planning (TAMP), current state-of-the-art approaches often remain computationally "heavyweight" or require extensive training on thousands of demonstrations. We present GRASP (Grounded Reasoning and Symbolic Planning), a framework designed as a step toward open-vocabulary tabletop manipulation. Our approach leverages a pretrained VLM to translate natural-language queries into neuro-symbolic goal states, grounded in the physical world via a bounding-box detection pipeline. Unlike methods that rely on fixed color lists or hard-coded coordinates, GRASP enables robots to interpret abstract spatial concepts such as "top shelf" and execute tasks without additional fine-tuning. We achieve 73.3% overall success across 90 real-robot trials at three difficulty levels, requiring no task-specific training.

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

Refusal Beyond a Single Direction: A Preliminary Comparison of Diff-in-Means and INLP

arXiv:2606.13720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arditi et al. (2024) has shown that refusal in safety fine-tuned chat models is mediated by a single linear direction in the residual stream, recoverable by a difference-in-means (DiM) of harmful and harmless activations. We compare DiM-based interventions (activation addition and directional ablation) with two interventions derived from Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP) – nullspace projection and counterfactual flipping – on five open-weight chat models, asking whether INLP can match DiM at steering refusal and whether its richer parameterisation yields more tweakable interventions. INLP counterfactual flipping is competitive with DiM directional ablation on refusal suppression, while nullspace projection is consistently weaker. Restricting INLP to the leading directions of the extracted subspace preserves most of the suppression effect at near-baseline perplexity, giving a tunable capability. Geometrically, the two INLP interventions land in qualitatively different regions of activation space: nullspace projection collapses transformed activations between the harmful and harmless clusters, while counterfactual flipping moves them into the opposite cluster, suggesting that the model encodes the absence of a concept differently from its opposite – an intriguing distinction that warrants further investigation in future work.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A New Definition of Quantum Superposition

arXiv:2606.15607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The usual description of the superposition of two (pure quantum) states is ambiguous, since the binary operation of summation in a Hilbert space does not pass down to the quotient projective space. Even though Dirac noted this as early as 1930, it is often asserted that the superposition is a binary operation acting on two states with a value that is a unique state. The goal for this note is to motivate a rigorous, geometrical definition of the superposition of states in the setting of complex projective space, which has been argued elsewhere to be the natural geometric phase space for quantum theory. The upshot is that the new definition of the superposition of two pure states, viewed as two distinct points in the projective space, is the unique (complex) line on which those two points lie. Finally, a comparison is given between superposition and expansion in an orthonormal basis.

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

PISA: A Pragmatic Psych-Inspired Unified Memory System for Enhanced AI Agency

arXiv:2510.15966v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Memory systems are fundamental to AI agents, yet existing work often lacks adaptability to diverse tasks and overlooks the constructive and task-oriented role of AI agent memory. Drawing from Piaget's theory of cognitive development, we propose PISA, a pragmatic, psych-inspired unified memory system that addresses these limitations by treating memory as a constructive and adaptive process. To enable continuous learning and adaptability, PISA introduces a trimodal adaptation mechanism (i.e., schema updation, schema evolution, and schema creation) that preserves coherent organization while supporting flexible memory updates. Building on these schema-grounded structures, we further design a hybrid memory access architecture that seamlessly integrates symbolic reasoning with neural retrieval, significantly improving retrieval accuracy and efficiency. Our empirical evaluation, conducted on the existing LOCOMO benchmark and our newly proposed AggQA benchmark for data analysis tasks, confirms that PISA sets a new state-of-the-art by significantly enhancing adaptability and long-term knowledge retention.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Did You Forget What I Asked? Prospective Memory Failures in Large Language Models

作者:

Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled paradigm that combines verifiable formatting constraints with benchmark tasks of increasing complexity. Across three model families and over 8,000 prompts, compliance drops by 2-21% under concurrent task load. Vulnerability is highly type-dependent: terminal constraints (requiring action at the response boundary) degrade most, with drops up to 50%, while avoidance constraints remain comparatively robust. A salience-enhanced format (explicit instruction framing plus a trailing reminder) recovers much of the lost compliance, restoring performance to 90-100% in many settings. Interference is bidirectional: formatting constraints can also reduce task accuracy, with one model's GSM8K accuracy dropping from 93% to 27%. In additional stacking experiments, joint compliance declines sharply as constraints accumulate. All results use deterministic programmatic checkers without an LLM-as-judge component on publicly available datasets.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

E-VAds: An E-commerce Short Videos Understanding Benchmark for MLLMs

E-commerce short videos represent a high-revenue segment of the online video industry characterized by a goal-driven format and dense multi-modal signals. Current models often struggle with these videos because existing benchmarks focus primarily on general-purpose tasks and neglect the reasoning of commercial intent. In this work, we first propose a multi-modal information density assessment framework to quantify the complexity of this domain. Our evaluation reveals that e-commerce content exhibits substantially higher density across visual, audio, and textual modalities compared to mainstream datasets, establishing a more challenging frontier for video understanding. To address this gap, we introduce E-commerce Video Ads Benchmark, which is the first benchmark specifically designed for e-commerce short video understanding. We curated 3,961 high-quality videos from Taobao covering a wide range of product categories and used a multi-agent system to generate 19,785 open-ended Q&A pairs, which consist of five distinct tasks. Finally, we develop E-VAds-R1, an RL-based reasoning model featuring a multi-grained reward design called MG-GRPO. This strategy provides smooth guidance for early exploration while creating a non-linear incentive for expert-level precision. Experimental results demonstrate that E-VAds-R1 achieves a 109.2% performance gain in commercial intent reasoning with only a few hundred training samples. Data is available at https://github.com/TaobaoTmall-AlgorithmProducts/E-VAds_Benchmark.

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

HY-WU (Part I): An Extensible Functional Neural Memory Framework and An Instantiation in Text-Guided Image Editing

Foundation models are transitioning from offline predictors to deployed systems expected to operate over long time horizons. In real deployments, objectives are not fixed: domains drift, user preferences evolve, and new tasks appear after the model has shipped. This elevates continual learning and instant personalization from optional features to core architectural requirements. Yet most adaptation pipelines still follow a static weight paradigm: after training (or after any adaptation step), inference executes a single parameter vector regardless of user intent, domain, or instance-specific constraints. This treats the trained or adapted model as a single point in parameter space. In heterogeneous and continually evolving regimes, distinct objectives can induce separated feasible regions over parameters, forcing any single shared update into compromise, interference, or overspecialization. As a result, continual learning and personalization are often implemented as repeated overwriting of shared weights, risking degradation of previously learned behaviors. We propose HY-WU (Weight Unleashing), a memory-first adaptation framework that shifts adaptation pressure away from overwriting a single shared parameter point. HY-WU implements functional (operator-level) memory as a neural module: a generator that synthesizes weight updates on-the-fly from the instance condition, yielding instance-specific operators without test-time optimization.

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

Finite-Time Convergence of Distributionally Robust Q-Learning with Linear Function Approximation

arXiv:2510.01721v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) seeks policies that perform well when the deployment transition model differs from the nominal model generating the data. Most finite-sample guarantees for DRRL are tabular, model-based, rely on generative access, or obtain function-approximation guarantees only under additional structure, such as linear-transition models or restrictive discount-factor conditions. We study discounted model-free robust Q-learning under an $(s,a)$-rectangular chi-square uncertainty set, with linear approximation of the robust Q-function, using only a single Markovian trajectory from an unknown nominal model. Our algorithm combines a target-network outer loop with a dual function-approximation scheme for the chi-square robust Bellman update. The dual procedure uses moment-tracking critics, suffix averaging, a fresh-evaluation stage for the variance-like moment, and a tunable smoothing parameter to have a Lipschitz-continuous chi-square dual gradient. We prove a finite-time convergence bound to the optimal robust Q-function up to approximation error, without imposing a small-discount-factor assumption. Our results help close a gap between the empirical use of robust RL algorithms and the non-asymptotic guarantees available for their non-robust counterparts.

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

Keep It in Mind: User Centric Continual Spatial Intelligence Reasoning in Egocentric Video Streams

We introduce UCS-Bench, a dataset spanning 170+ hours of egocentric visual observations with 8.1K+ timestamped questions for diagnosing User-Centric Continual Spatial intelligence in egocentric video streams. UCS-Bench targets a new problem that emphasizes dynamic spatial reasoning, long-term memory, and their alignment with users' real-time locations. We propose DirectMe, a framework that incrementally constructs and maintains a structured spatial memory from streaming egocentric observations. DirectMe enables robust tracking and recall of object locations, all relative to the user's movement over time. By tightly coupling visual perception with memory updates and spatial reasoning, our approach supports long-horizon queries that require recalling interactions, resolving viewpoint-induced ambiguities, and adapting to dynamic scenes. Our experiments show that DirectMe significantly improves the spatial reasoning of leading multimodal LLMs; it also surpasses many spatially aware and long-form streaming video models. We hope our benchmark and solution will advance spatial intelligence research for egocentric AI assistants. Data and code are available at https://github.com/cocowy1/UCS-Bench.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimal Calibration of Quantum Network Links

arXiv:2606.18167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The reliable distribution of entanglement is essential for the effective operation of quantum networks. Due to fundamental differences between quantum and classical communication systems, it is necessary to develop specialised algorithms and protocols that also account for quantum-specific constraints. In this work, we focus on the issue of recalibration. As suggested by recent experimental studies, the process of local entanglement generation in a quantum link degrades over time due to environmental changes that have to be estimated and compensated via a calibration operation, during which the link is not available. Therefore, in such a quantum network, every link alternates between an activation period, during which it operates normally, and a calibration period, during which it cannot participate in the end-to-end entanglement distribution, thereby creating a trade-off between link quality (the fidelity of generated pairs, which decays during activation) and availability (the fraction of time the link is usable, which calibration reduces). We develop analytically a protocol for optimally assigning activation periods to each link in linear quantum repeater chains, subject to any general end-to-end fidelity requirements and local initial fidelity thresholds. Building on this foundation, we extend to general quantum networks, where multiple paths may cross at common links, proposing a heuristic approach evaluated in simulations and compared with a benchmark, numerical approach, and theoretical bounds.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DeepMine-Mamba: Mitigating Information Dilution in Mamba-Based State Space Models for Document Image Binarization

Document image binarization aims to separate foreground text from degraded backgrounds while preserving thin, broken, and low-contrast strokes. Although deep learning methods have improved binarization performance, most existing approaches rely on convolutional, transformer-based, or generative architectures, while Mamba-based state space models remain largely unexplored for this task. In this work, we investigate Mamba-based feature propagation and observe that direct state-space propagation may dilute weak foreground cues during long-range modeling, especially faint ink traces, fragmented characters, and boundary-sensitive stroke details. To address this problem, we propose DeepMine-Mamba, a Mamba-based binarization framework equipped with a novel Anti-Dilution Gate that estimates propagation-induced feature changes and selectively restores stroke-sensitive local responses while suppressing unnecessary background enhancement. Experiments on DIBCO/H-DIBCO benchmarks under a strict leave-one-year-out protocol show that DeepMine-Mamba achieves competitive overall performance, with strong average FM and Fps across benchmark years. Ablation results further show that the Anti-Dilution Gate is the key component for mitigating propagation-induced foreground dilution and improving stroke preservation.

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

If These Walls Could Talk: Critical Play with Large Language Models in Museums

arXiv:2606.15565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in museums to as role playing chatbots which let visitors talk to simulated versions of people and artefacts from the past. While such installations can be playful and engaging, they are also problematic because LLMs cannot be trusted to speak truthfully. I identify a fundamental dilemma for the use of LLMs in museum chatbots: LLMs cannot be trusted to tell the truth, and efforts to make them more reliable may ruin that which is attractive about the bots in the first place - their ability to engage in life-like conversation. In response, I propose designing for critical play with LLM-based bots: Designing for playful interactions with bots that are unreliable but still able to represent the past in an adequate and engaging manner - as fictional characters representing historical narratives, styles of discourse, diverse perspectives, humor and satire.

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

Right Predictions, Misleading Explanations: On the Vulnerability of Vision-Language Model Explanations

Explanation mechanisms are increasingly used to support transparency and trust in vision-language models (VLMs), particularly in settings where model decisions require human oversight. However, the robustness of these explanations remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate whether explanation heatmaps in VLMs, particularly CLIP-based models, faithfully reflect model reasoning under adversarial conditions. We show that explanation maps can be systematically manipulated while preserving the model's original prediction, revealing a disconnect between predictive behavior and explanation faithfulness. To study this vulnerability, we introduce X-Shift, a novel grey-box attack that perturbs patch-level visual representations to redirect explanation heatmaps toward semantically irrelevant regions without altering the predicted output. Unlike conventional adversarial attacks that aim to induce misclassification, X-Shift specifically targets the integrity of the explanation process itself. The attack operates without modifying model parameters and generalizes across multiple CLIP architectures and explanation methods. We evaluate the proposed approach on ImageNet-1k, MS-COCO, and Flickr30K, demonstrating consistent degradation in explanation alignment under imperceptible perturbations while maintaining prediction stability. Furthermore, standard prediction-oriented adversarial attacks fail to reproduce the same explanation-shifting behavior even under substantially larger perturbation budgets. Our findings highlight a fundamental limitation of current explanation mechanisms in VLMs and raise concerns about their use as reliable indicators of model trustworthiness in high-impact applications.

23.
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.

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

Beyond Static Endpoints: Tool Programs as an Interface for Flexible Agentic Web Services

arXiv:2606.19992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the agentic web era, LLM-based agents increasingly invoke web services as tools, yet most interfaces remain static endpoints that poorly express long-horizon workflows with loops, conditionals, joins, and retries. We present ToolPro, which represents an agent's tool intent as an executable tool program that compactly encodes multi-step service interactions with explicit effect types. ToolPro combines constraint-guided program construction, effect-aware replay for exactly-once state-modifying calls, and a profile-driven policy that decides when program execution outperforms stepwise calling. We instantiate ToolPro over MCP-style services with WebAssembly sandboxing and evaluate it on diverse workflows of real-world applications. ToolPro reduces end-to-end latency by up to 53.4\% and client-side traffic by up to 96.1\%, with larger gains under higher network latency and workflow complexity.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Token-Operations-Oriented Inference Optimization Techniques for Large Models

Large model inference optimization serves as a key foundation for supporting the scalable, low-cost, and highly stable operation of large model services. Centered on token-oriented inference optimization technology, this paper proposes for the first time a four-layer technical architecture consisting of Multi-model Fusion, Model Optimization, Compute-Model Fusion, and Compute-Network-Model Fusion. It systematically reviews the key technologies and current industry status across these four levels and analyzes the application value of related technologies in real-world business scenarios. This paper provides a practical technical path for reducing token production costs, improving token service efficiency, ensuring the stability of token supply, and driving the transition of large model services from being merely callable to being operable.