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 (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Crossovers of Stabilizer Entropy Beyond Criticality

arXiv:2606.13810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stabilizer Rényi entropy has emerged as a probe of nonstabilizerness in quantum many-body systems, but its scaling structure beyond critical points remains poorly understood compared with entanglement entropy. Recent field-theory approaches indicate that stabilizer entropy contains universal critical data and boundary-sensitive terms, raising the question of how these structures extend into massive and crossover regimes. We address this problem for a broad class of finite-range spin chains at Rényi index one-half. We derive exact finite-size formulas for both full periodic chains and finite intervals of the infinite chain, making the universal crossover from critical to noncritical behavior analytically accessible. In periodic geometry, the entropy obeys a volume law away from criticality and exhibits a universal finite-size crossover controlled by the competition between system size and correlation length. We also show that the large-scale SRE density develops a cusp across the field-tuned critical line, while the XX endpoint is governed by a distinct scaling regime associated with the saturation point. In the subsystem geometry, the interval entropy separates bulk critical behavior from boundary contributions generated by the way the finite region cuts the infinite chain. The crossover from critical to massive behavior is then encoded in boundary constants and universal functions controlled by the correlation length. Through exact stabilizer-entropy correspondences, the scaling theory extends to internal XY reductions, Finite-range spin chains, and Cluster–Ising representatives. Our results provide an exact lattice benchmark for the emerging QFT description of stabilizer entropy beyond isolated conformal points.

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

DN-Hypo-Pipeline: An AI-Driven Workflow for Hypothesis Generation via Large Language Models and Scientific Explanations

arXiv:2606.08532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A scientific hypothesis is the first step in research and undergoes experimental validation, yet it also reflects a deep understanding of and reasoning about scientific phenomena. We introduce DN-Hypo-Pipeline, an AI-powered workflow based on large language models, designed to support structured scientific thinking and hypothesis generation by leveraging scientific explanations as prior knowledge. This pipeline assists researchers in deriving novel hypotheses from existing literature. Given the explanandum (i.e., the conclusion) of a research paper, it identifies underlying laws, theories, and principles, and reconstructs a new, yet-to-be-verified explanation for the observed phenomenon. We evaluated DN-Hypo-Pipeline in the field of data science modeling using three highly cited papers. Statistical inference, supported by both LLM-as-judge assessment and human expert evaluation, demonstrates that our pipeline is more effective than direct generation methods. Additionally, we validated the two highest-scoring generated hypotheses by developing corresponding novel algorithms, which outperformed the baseline models presented in the original papers. Beyond application in data science, DN-Hypo-Pipeline provides a theoretical framework that not only encompasses theory-guided data science modeling methods but also reveals a more fundamental structure of the modeling process. Moreover, this approach is essentially a generalization of theory-guided modeling, offering potential for extension to other domains and across a broader range of scientific disciplines.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Scaling Self-Play for End-to-End Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on offline human-demonstration datasets that provide limited state coverage and often no closed-loop feedback, making them prone to compounding errors when deployed in closed-loop and brittle to long-tail agent interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative strategy for training end-to-end driving models: large-scale self-play directly from pixels in simulation. While prior self-play approaches have shown promising transfer to real-world driving, they typically assume vectorized Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) observations that are incompatible with end-to-end policies operating directly on sensor observations. To this end, we introduce Gigapixel, a high-throughput batched driving simulator with perspective rendering, enabling scalable self-play directly from pixel observations. Rather than targeting compute-costly photorealistic sensor simulation, Gigapixel renders a simplified bounding-box world that preserves essential scene structure while achieving throughput at 50k agent steps per second. Since direct pixel-space self-play RL is prohibitively sample-inefficient at end-to-end model scale, we propose self-play DAgger training: we train pixel-based policies in self-play via on-policy distillation from a privileged RL teacher. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we subsequently transfer the self-play trained policies to real-world sensor data through lightweight perception adaptation. Policies trained in Gigapixel and adapted to real-world sensor data achieve competitive performance on the HUGSIM and NAVSIM-v2 benchmarks without human trajectory supervision. Moreover, scaling self-play training yields proportional gains in policy performance, establishing self-play as a practical and scalable strategy for training end-to-end models.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Multi-strain Probiotics Alter Gut Microbiota and Estrobolome Pathways in Primary Dysmenorrhea

Background: Exact cause of primary dysmenorrhoea is unknown but recent evidence uncovers a potential link between gut dysbiosis and benign gynaecological disorder via disruption of estrobolome. Methods: A randomized controlled trial to investigate the effects of multi-strain oral probiotics on primary dysmenorrhoea has been conducted. This is a secondary analysis comparing the stool microbiome in women with primary dysmenorrhoea and those without (control), and the effects of treatment with probiotics versus placebo. Results: Although microbial richness and evenness were comparable between groups (alpha diversity, p > 0.05), gut microbial community composition differed significantly (Bray Curtis PERMANOVA, p = 0.015), characterised by reduced Bifidobacterium adolescentis and Blautia and enrichment of Faecalibacterium in dysmenorrhoea, alongside condition-specific core taxa. Post-intervention analysis revealed significant shifts in microbial community structure between pre- and post-treatment groups (PERMANOVA, F = 2.11, p = 0.005), with probiotic supplementation inducing more consistent and directed microbiome changes than placebo, without altering alpha diversity (p > 0.05). Functional prediction showed no significant difference in overall beta glucuronidase pathway abundance (p > 0.05); however, dysmenorrhoea was associated with higher abundance of beta glucuronidase producing taxa (MaAsLin2, q < 0.05) that were differentially modulated by probiotic treatment. Conclusion: This discovery provides evidence on the microbial disruption in primary dysmenorrhoea as well as the benefit of probiotics to modulate the intestinal microbiota to improve the condition.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fun with Graph States: Nonlocal Bell Pairs and the Arf Invariant

arXiv:2606.06582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study inner products and partial amplitudes of graph states–a commonly employed class of quantum states, which are specified by graphs. We find that the magnitudes of these quantities are simply related to the rank of the adjacency matrix of the graph over F_2 while the phase is determined by the Arf invariant of its quadratic refinement. These facts motivate a nonlocal tensor factorization of the Hilbert space, with respect to which all graph states are products of Bell pairs with unentangled ancillae. These results may illuminate the quantum advantage in the framework of Measurement-Based Quantum Computation and suggest that graph states can be usefully visualized in the language of algebraic topology. In addition, we develop a specialized technique for computing expectation values of qubit-wise permutations in graph states, which is useful for calculating multi-invariants.

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

Steering Where to Listen: Instruction-Based Activation Steering Redirects Temporal Attention in Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at audio understanding but expose little about where in an audio signal they attend. We introduce instruction-based vector steering, which constructs a steering vector by contrasting activations from differently instructed prompts while keeping the audio fixed. Through a systematic probe of LALM attention, we find that - unlike standard prompting or audio-based steering - this intervention significantly redistributes the temporal attention allocated to audio tokens, concentrating it on acoustically relevant regions. We then show that this attention shift is behaviorally meaningful: in a controlled three-event setting, reading out the temporal position of maximal steering-induced attention change recovers the location of a queried sound event without any training, attaining 60.87% and 68.72% overlap with ground-truth intervals on Qwen2-Audio and Audio Flamingo 3, far above direct prompting (31.84%, 46.75%) and random baselines (27.74%). Our results characterize a mechanistic property of instruction-based steering in LALMs and provide a training-free probe for the latent temporal structure these models encode.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Surrogate Assisted Pedestrian Protection Design via a Foundation Model Orchestrated Workflow

arXiv:2606.17577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-driven engineering workflows face particular challenges in crash safety design: unlike aerodynamics, crash events involve highly nonlinear contact dynamics, material nonlinearity, and discrete state transitions that are difficult to capture with data-driven surrogate models. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first foundation model–orchestrated workflow for crash safety design that enables surrogate-assisted exploration for pedestrian protection, reducing evaluation time from hours per CAE simulation to seconds. The workflow integrates four components: (1) a surrogate trained on CAE crash simulations to predict pedestrian leg injury metrics from design parameters, achieving an average $R^2=0.87$ and providing distribution-free conformal prediction intervals; (2) multiobjective evolutionary search (NSGA-II) to discover diverse feasible parameter sets under user-specified constraints; (3) a morphing-based geometry generator that maps parameters to topology-preserving 3D shapes; and (4) a natural-language interface in which an LLM orchestrates the workflow and a vision–language model supports semantic comparison of generated designs. In an automotive front-bumper case study, the workflow produces 35 distinct safety-compliant alternatives from a single exploration, a process that would require weeks with conventional CAE iteration. These results suggest that foundation models can serve as integration layers between ML surrogates and physics-based simulation, helping bring AI capabilities to safety-critical engineering domains.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

What does measuring one qubit reveal about another? $K$-networks as a directed diagnostic for quantum circuits

arXiv:2606.16549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many-qubit circuit states are hard to inspect directly, so they are often summarized by pairwise graph weights. Common pairwise weights report symmetric correlations, while many circuit questions are directed and basis-specific: if qubit $i$ is measured in a given basis, how strongly does the outcome reshape the conditional state of qubit $j$? We define $K_{i\to j}$, a directed, basis-conditioned edge weight for this question. It is large when the two measurement outcomes occur with comparable probability and leave qubit $j$ in clearly different conditional states; it is zero when the source outcome is deterministic or the target states are indistinguishable. The scalar uses standard binary-ensemble distinguishability; the paper's contribution is to turn this conditional comparison into a directed network layer for circuit states. The resulting networks are computable from two-qubit reduced density matrices. They are diagnostic (not entanglement measures): for pure two-qubit states $K$ reduces to the tangle $C^2$ (squared concurrence)[WoottersConcurrence,CKWTangle], while separable mixed states can reach $K=1$. Examples on teleportation, Grover, QAOA, and random circuit families show the intended use: $K$-networks map feed-forward, phase, and interaction-graph structure that symmetric or computational-basis summaries can leave weak or absent.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Evaluating Universal Machine Learning Force Fields Against Experimental Measurements

arXiv:2508.05762v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Universal machine learning force fields (UMLFFs) promise to revolutionize materials science by enabling rapid atomistic simulations across the periodic table. However, their evaluation has been limited to computational benchmarks that may not reflect real-world performance. We introduce UniFFBench, a comprehensive evaluation framework featuring the MinX dataset – a diverse collection of 1,500+ mineral systems spanning 85 elements, extreme thermodynamic conditions (0–5000 K, 0–1000 GPa), and structural complexity, including partial occupancy and disorder. This diversity, combined with experimental reference values for validation, enables assessment of UMLFF generalization across chemical space and conditions substantially beyond typical training scenarios. Our systematic evaluation of six state-of-the-art UMLFFs reveals a substantial ``reality gap'': models achieving impressive performance on computational benchmarks often fail when confronted with experimental complexity. Even the best-performing models exhibit higher density prediction error than the threshold required for practical applications. We observe disconnects between simulation stability and mechanical property accuracy, with prediction errors correlating with training data representation rather than the modeling method.

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

Algebraic Dead Directions in LayerNorm Transformers: A Forward-Pass-Only Diagnostic at LLM Scale

arXiv:2606.19491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained transformers sit near singular minima of the loss, where the Fisher information metric degenerates along dead directions: directions in parameter space along which the directional Fisher vanishes. Locating such a direction normally needs a forward pass and an eigendecomposition of activations, or a sampling-based complexity estimate; none returns a direction computable from the network's parameters alone. We give one, for LayerNorm transformers. The inverse-scale direction $\gamma^{-1}/\|\gamma^{-1}\|$ of the LayerNorm affine is an exact algebraic kernel of the post-final-norm centred activation covariance, for any input distribution, and induces a corresponding dead direction in parameter space. It is read from the LN scale parameter alone, with no forward or backward pass and no eigensolve: the cheapest dead-direction read, specific to LayerNorm. We test it on $14$ pretrained transformers ($9$ LayerNorm, $5$ RMSNorm; $160$M-$35$B; language and vision objectives). At random initialisation the predicted direction matches the measured bottom singular direction (one forward pass, direct SVD) to four decimal places on $9/9$ LayerNorm models, and is correctly absent on $5/5$ RMSNorm models, which lack the mean-subtraction projector that creates it. On the trained checkpoint the covariance eigenvalue along this direction deepens by ${\sim}10^3\times$ and further dead directions open; the random-init-to-trained gap is a one-forward-pass, per-checkpoint readout of singular structure along the predicted coordinate. Two consequences follow in closed form: the residual stream's smallest singular value is preserved block-to-block on $13/14$ transformers measured on their own input distribution, the one exception (Gemma$4$-$31$B) a genuine dead direction the same read pinpoints; and the kernel direction's presence classifies a transformer's normalisation from the parameters alone.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Automated AI-Based Ventricular Subcompartment Segmentation and Volumetry in Idiopathic Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus

Purpose In idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (iNPH), longitudinal monitoring of ventricular size is important for diagnosis and treatment follow-up. This study aimed to validate a fully automated AI model for CT ventricular volumetry with subcompartments and to compare AI-derived volume changes with routine radiology assessments. Methods This retrospective, single-center study included 88 patients with iNPH and 456 non-contrast-enhanced head CT examinations. The model was trained on 38 manually labeled CT scans with 12 ventricular subcompartments. Outcomes included segmentation accuracy, correspondence between AI-derived longitudinal ventricular volume changes and radiology report categories (decreased, unchanged, increased), radiologist detection thresholds for ventricular change, and paired pre- and postoperative volume changes in 22 patients with ventriculoperitoneal shunt. Results Mean segmentation accuracy was high (Dice, 0.83). 91% of 100 segmentations were rated as excellent by an expert neuroradiologist. AI-derived ventricular volume changes corresponded well to radiology report categories (median total ventricular volume changes of -17% in cases reported as decreased, 0% in unchanged cases, and +22% in increased cases; all p < 0.001). Radiologists reported ventricular volume change in 50% of cases at an AI-measured relative volume change of +/-6%, and in 90% of cases at +21% for enlargement and -18% for decrease. After shunt placement, ventricular volume decreased by -8% (median), with the largest relative reductions observed in the right temporal and occipital horns. Conclusions Automated AI-based ventricular segmentation on CT enables accurate and reproducible assessment of ventricular volume changes in iNPH and complements routine radiological evaluation for longitudinal and postoperative monitoring.

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

XMedFusion: A Knowledge-Guided Multimodal Perception and Reasoning Framework for Autonomous Medical Systems

Autonomous medical and robotic systems increasingly rely on intelligent perception and reasoning capabilities to interpret visual data and support clinical decision making. Radiology report generation represents a critical component of such automated diagnostic workflows, yet existing end-to-end multimodal models often suffer from weak visual grounding, resulting in unreliable interpretations and omission of subtle clinical findings. This paper presents XMedFusion, a modular AI framework designed as an intelligent perception and reasoning module for autonomous medical systems. The proposed framework decomposes visual information into coordinated functional components that emulate expert-driven analysis, including a visual perception agent that extracts image-grounded evidence, a knowledge graph construction agent that structures clinically relevant findings, and a retrieval-guided drafting process that ensures a consistent reporting structure. A synthesis agent iteratively integrates visual and structured evidence through reasoning-driven verification to produce reliable and interpretable diagnostic outputs. Experimental evaluation on a public chest radiograph dataset demonstrates significant improvements over baseline vision-language models, achieving gains from 0.0493 to 0.3359 in BLEU-1, 0.0863 to 0.2440 in ROUGE-L, and 0.0829 to 0.1708 in METEOR, along with substantial improvements in semantic evaluation metrics such as Consistency (2.38 to 7.80) and Accuracy (2.34 to 6.93). The results highlight the effectiveness of structured multi-agent perception and reasoning for enhancing robustness, transparency, and automation in intelligent medical imaging systems, enabling integration into autonomous healthcare and robotic diagnostic workflows.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

BIM-Edit: Benchmarking Large Language Models for IFC-Based Building Information Modeling

arXiv:2606.20146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to computer-aided design (CAD) to generate design artifacts from textual instructions. In engineering practice, this requires more than creating new geometry, models must also understand existing scenes, edit them correctly, and preserve semantics and relations. However, many CAD benchmarks focus on creating new models rather than editing existing ones, and mostly evaluate geometric correctness. We introduce BIM-Edit, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs on natural-language editing of Building Information Models (BIM) represented in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) format. BIM provides a challenging testbed because building models encode geometry together with semantic and relational structure. BIM-Edit contains 324 editing tasks spanning 11 realistic building models and 36 synthetic scenes. Tasks are expressed using three instruction categories - direct, spatial, and topological - covering both explicit and scene-grounded edits. We evaluate outputs along three dimensions: geometric accuracy, semantic validity, and topological consistency. Across evaluated LLMs, the best-performing model achieves only 49.5% average score across the three metrics, and no model fully solves more than 3.4% of tasks. These results demonstrate a substantial gap between current LLM capabilities and the requirements of structured engineering design workflows.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Adaptable Method for Crystal Design across Diverse Constraints and Objectives with Pretrained Property Predictors

arXiv:2410.08562v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advanced crystal design can accelerate materials discovery across applications from photovoltaics to spintronics. Practical design must satisfy multiple properties and physical constraints, yet existing machine-learning-based approaches to such design often depend on large datasets, retraining, or task-specific generators. Here, we show that direct predictor-guided gradient optimization enables data-efficient, constraint-rich crystal design by combining off-the-shelf predictors with site-wise element masks, template initialization, and task-specific losses. In perovskites, it outperformed generative and Bayesian baselines under three targets – band gap, formation energy, and tolerance factor – and two hard constraints. DFT assessment further showed band-gap targeting competitive with a leading generative model despite using predictors trained on roughly one-tenth of the data. By flexibly combining pretrained predictors with application-oriented masks and custom losses, the same framework supported half-metal design. Such modularity could help researchers and engineers translate diverse application requirements directly into optimized candidate crystals with minimal computational cost.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks in AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Evaluation Framework

arXiv:2604.22119v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As reasoning capacity and deployment scope grow in tandem, large language models (LLMs) gain the capacity to engage in behaviors that serve their own objectives, a class of risks we term Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks (ESRRs). These include, but are not limited to, deception (intentionally misleading users or evaluators), evaluation gaming (strategically manipulating performance during safety testing), and reward hacking (exploiting misspecified objectives). Systematically understanding and benchmarking these risks remains an open challenge. To address this gap, we introduce ESRRSim, a taxonomy-driven agentic framework for automated behavioral risk evaluation. We construct an extensible risk taxonomy of 7 categories, which is decomposed into 20 subcategories. ESRRSim generates evaluation scenarios designed to elicit faithful reasoning, paired with dual rubrics assessing both model responses and reasoning traces, in a judge-agnostic and scalable architecture. Evaluation across 11 reasoning LLMs reveals substantial variation in risk profiles (detection rates ranging 14.45%-72.72%), with dramatic generational improvements suggesting models may increasingly recognize and adapt to evaluation contexts.

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

Running hardware-aware neural architecture search on embedded devices under 512MB of RAM

arXiv:2606.14824v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This document proposes a novel approach to hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS) that considers the resources available on the computing platform running it, enabling its execution on various embedded devices. The presented HW NAS produces tiny convolutional neural networks (CNNs) targeting low-end microcontroller units (MCUs), typically involved in the Internet of Things (IoT) or wearable robotics, opening new use cases. A gateway could run it to tailor CNNs' architecture on the acquired data without using external servers, ensuring privacy. The proposed technique achieves state-of-the-art results in the human-recognition tasks on the Visual Wake Word dataset, a standard TinyML benchmark, on several embedded devices.

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

Towards Fully Automated Exam Grading: Fairness-Aware Recognition of Handwritten Answers with Foundation Models

Correcting handwritten exams by hand is time-consuming and error-prone, particularly for large cohorts, while fully digital exams tend to force a didactic narrowing towards closed question formats. A practical middle ground keeps paper-based, problem-oriented tasks but records the assessment-relevant answers as single capital letters in a table that a machine can read. The open question is whether this reading can be made accurate and, above all, fair enough for unsupervised grading. Earlier automated approaches reached only about 88%–91% recognition – too low – and failed on the cases that matter most: answers placed outside the cell, crossed out, or written in cursive. We show that general-purpose vision-language foundation models (VLMs), which interpret the page rather than match pixel templates, close this gap. On a benchmark of 61 anonymised exams (3141 answer positions) the best model reaches 98.4% accuracy, well above the previous baseline. Crucially, we centre the evaluation on fairness: we distinguish false negatives (a correct answer marked wrong, which disadvantages the student) from false positives, and a lightweight prompt that supplies the reference solution as context lowers the false-negative rate to 0.58%. Under an exemplary grading scheme only three of the 61 exams would be graded worse, all caught by a student self-review step. Fully automated, fairness-aware exam grading at scale is therefore defensible; we release the anonymised benchmark to support reproducibility.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

A Unifying Lens on Reward Uncertainty in RLHF

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is bottlenecked by reward hacking, where the policy exploits errors in a proxy reward model (RM) and produces high RM scores without genuine quality gains. A natural mitigation is pessimism: lowering rewards in regions where the RM is uncertain. However, standard scalar RMs provide no principled notion of uncertainty. We argue that the right object is a distributional reward model $p(r\mid x,y)$. Under either a Bayesian inference or a KL-distributionally robust optimization (KL-DRO) lens, the KL-regularized RLHF objective admits a closed-form effective reward $\tilde r(x,y) = \pm\beta\log\mathbb{E}_p[e^{\pm r/\beta}]$. The pessimistic branch unifies the prior heuristics for RM ensemble aggregation: mean aggregation, worst-case optimization (WCO), and uncertainty-weighted optimization (UWO) all emerge as limits or truncations of this single expression. This also clarifies the implicit assumptions of each existing rule.

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

BRICKS-WM: Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models

arXiv:2606.16489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has achieved remarkable success in continuous control by leveraging latent world models. However, prevailing approaches typically rely on monolithic latent dynamics, entangling environment dynamics into a coupled process. This coupling severely limits reusability: altering the agent necessitates retraining the entire world from scratch, even if the environment remains constant. To address this, we introduce BRICKS-WM (Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models), a framework for the modular assembly of structured world models. Driven by the insight that the physical world is composed of independent entities, we posit that global dynamics can be modeled as a composition of distinct dynamical modules interacting via latent interfaces. As a minimal instantiation, we factorize the latent state space into an actuated Agent module and an external Background module, bridged by a learned latent interface. Unlike prior object-centric methods that prioritize visual segmentation, BRICKS-WM enforces a functional separation in transition dynamics, ensuring that background dynamics remains agnostic to the agent's dynamics. Empirically, BRICKS-WM achieves control performance comparable to strong monolithic baselines when trained from scratch, and enables the reuse of frozen background dynamics across agents.

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

Are Online Skill and Memory Modules Always Worth Their Tokens? A Budget-Constrained Study of Web Agents

Online web agents often augment a base actor with memory, workflow, or skill modules. These modules can improve performance, but they also consume test-time tokens, a cost rarely reported alongside the actor's inference cost. We study online augmentation, where this overhead is paid on every task, and re-evaluate its benefits under a fixed total inference budget. We compare AWM, ASI, and ReasoningBank with a token-matched vanilla baseline that uses the same budget for additional actor steps. Across three WebArena domains and three models, Gemini 3 Flash, GPT-5.4-mini, and Qwen 3.6-27B, the vanilla baseline matches or surpasses all three augmentation methods in aggregate success rate while often using fewer total tokens. We observe a similar trend on WorkArena-L1 with Qwen 3.6-27B, indicating that the effect extends to enterprise knowledge-work tasks. Our results suggest that skills and workflow memory can be useful in specific domains, but their apparent gains often vanish against a budget-matched actor. We further show that run-to-run variance materially affects outcomes and should be reported as a core evaluation criterion for online web agents.

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

When Calibration Fails the Vulnerable Hospital: Federated Conformal Risk Control via Risk-Curve Shrinkage

arXiv:2606.20115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conformal risk control (CRC) provides distribution-free guarantees on segmentation quality by calibrating a prediction-set threshold on held-out data. In federated deployments, the standard approach pools calibration scores across sites into a single threshold. We provide the first quantification, on real multi-institutional brain tumor data (FeTS-2022, 1,251 subjects, 20 institutions), showing that this naive pooled CRC protects the average hospital but violates coverage at 40% of individual institutions, with the worst site exceeding the target false-negative rate by 7.8 percentage points. The naive alternative, per-site local CRC, largely restores coverage but inflates prediction sets by 83x, rendering them clinically useless. We propose a shrinkage-based federated CRC protocol: each site transmits only its empirical risk curve (G scalars) to a server, which computes a shrinkage-regularized threshold per site. A single hyperparameter n0 smoothly trades worst-case coverage for prediction-set efficiency; leave-one-site-out sensitivity analysis identifies n0=19, achieving 2.7/20 violations at 2.0x stretch. We further show that direct Lagrangian optimization of coverage budgets fails, concentrating risk on vulnerable hospitals, and that the finite-sample correction term is essential: removing it triples violations. The marginal CRC guarantee is preserved by construction under the stated site-mixture assumption; per-site coverage is validated across four targets with three seeds. No patient-level images, masks, or per-volume scores leave any site.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

UST-GNN: A Unified Spatial–Topological Graph Neural Network Framework for Urban Analytics–Demonstrated through a Case Study on Urban Health Prediction

arXiv:2504.04739v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how social, demographic, environmental, and spatial factors jointly shape urban outcomes is essential for sustainable urban development and evidence-based policy. Traditional statistical approaches often struggle to capture complex non-linear relationships, while many machine learning methods overlook the joint roles of spatial autocorrelation and network topology in urban systems. Recent advances in GeoAI have addressed these challenges only partially, often treating spatial effects, graph structure, evaluation, and interpretability separately. We present UST-GNN, a unified spatial–topological graph neural network framework that integrates neighbourhood connectivity, heterogeneous urban features, and positional/locational embeddings into a single representation. Using the MedSAT dataset, which contains over 150 environmental and socio-demographic variables and six prescription outcomes across 4,835 neighbourhoods in Greater London, UST-GNN outperforms strong statistical, geographically enhanced, and graph Machine Learning baselines, improving out-of-sample $R^2$ by 8.4–13.2\% under strict spatial cross-validation. We further introduce a lightweight principal-component module to interpret learned node embeddings geographically and relate them to policy-relevant covariates. The resulting analyses recover established patterns, offer new perspectives on debated associations, and reveal novel predictors warranting further causal investigation. Together, these findings demonstrate the value of graph-based spatial machine learning for urban health analytics, environmental inequality assessment, and evidence-based urban policy. Beyond predictive gains, UST-GNN provides a unified GeoAI analytical pipeline that can be embedded into urban digital twin workflows for scenario testing, monitoring, and data-informed decision-making for healthier, more sustainable cities.

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

HRIR-Former: Grid-Free Time-Domain Reconstruction of Head-Related Impulse Responses with a Spatially Encoded Transformer

arXiv:2603.27998v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Individualized head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) enable binaural rendering, but dense per-listener measurements are costly. We address HRIR spatial up-sampling from sparse per-listener measurements: given a few measured HRIRs for a listener, predict HRIRs at unmeasured target directions. Prior learning methods often work in the frequency domain, rely on minimum-phase assumptions or separate timing models, and use a fixed direction grid, which can degrade temporal fidelity and spatial continuity. We propose HRIR-Former, a time-domain, grid-free binaural Transformer for reconstructing HRIRs at arbitrary directions from sparse inputs. It uses sinusoidal spatial features, a Conv1D refinement module, and auxiliary interaural time difference (ITD) and interaural level difference (ILD) heads. On SONICOM, it improves normalized mean squared error (NMSE), cosine distance, and ITD/ILD errors over prior methods; ablations validate modules and show minimum-phase preprocessing is unnecessary.

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

TAROT: Task-Adaptive Refinement of LLM-prior Graphs for Few-shot Tabular Learning

arXiv:2606.11640v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-shot tabular learning provides a cost-effective approach for real-world applications where annotation is costly and collecting sufficient samples for new tasks is difficult. Existing Traditional and LLM-based methods have demonstrated effectiveness in few-shot scenarios. However, traditional methods need additional training on unlabeled or generated data, which incur significant computational overhead. In addition, LLM-based methods that directly feed raw tabular data into LLMs raise privacy and compliance concerns. More importantly, both paradigms largely overlook the semantic relationships between features, which provide structural and semantic prior for constructing a semantic graph. Semantic graph is essential for modeling meaningful feature interactions in few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we propose TAROT, a GNN-based framework that encodes the structural and semantic prior by constructing and refining a task-adaptive semantic graph from this prior, thereby improving predictive performance in few-shot tabular learning. TAROT first encodes heterogeneous tabular data into unified node semantic representations via a Unified Semantic Tabular Node Encoder (USTNE). Then, it prompts LLMs to infer the semantic relationship between features based on the task description and feature names to construct a semantic graph. To mitigate structural noise introduced by the hallucination of LLMs, TAROT introduces Task-adaptive Semantic Graph Refinement that prunes spurious or task-unrelated edges and adds missing task-related ones, aligning the graph structure with the downstream objective. Finally, a GNN performs message passing over the refined graph to capture task-related semantic dependencies for prediction. Extensive experiments on various few-shot tabular learning benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of TAROT, establishing it as a state-of-the-art approach in this domain.

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

ARTEMIS: Agent-guided Reliability-aware Temporal Mask Evolution for Imperfectly Supervised Video Polyp Segmentation

Imperfectly supervised video polyp segmentation (VPS) aims to learn dense, temporally consistent masks from inexpensive supervision, including weak annotations (points, scribbles) and semi-supervision with few densely labeled frames. This setting is clinically valuable but challenging due to weak contrast, ambiguous boundaries, motion blur, and specular highlights, compounded by sparse pixel-level guidance. While SAM2 can generate dense masks from sparse inputs, direct pseudo-labeling often yields geometry-degraded masks with boundary leakage, underutilizes temporal consistency, and ignores reliability. To address these issues, we propose ARTEMIS, a unified framework for imperfectly supervised VPS driven by agent-guided reliability-aware temporal mask evolution. ARTEMIS initializes coarse masks from available supervision: SAM2 converts points/scribbles, while dense labels serve as reliable anchors. A debate-and-judge vision-language agent selects reliable temporal anchors under weak supervision, which are propagated bidirectionally with SAM2 to refine unreliable or unlabeled frames. Finally, ARTEMIS trains the segmenter using temporal reliability-aware robust learning, incorporating reliability-guided reference selection, a Reference Prototype Transport Module, and reliability-aware robust loss. These components assess mask reliability, evolve anchors over time, transport target identity across frames, and down-weight noisy supervision instead of discarding difficult samples. Experiments on SUN-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB-612 under scribble, point, and limited-label settings demonstrate that ARTEMIS achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released at https://github.com/wangtong627/ARTEMIS.