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 (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Quenched and Annealed CLTs for the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment

arXiv:2510.11846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the asymptotic behavior of random dimer coverings of the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment. We investigate quenched limit theorems for the height function and we extend annealed limit theorems that were recently studied in [arXiv:2507.08560]. We consider more general choices of random edge weights (independence is not assumed) and we distinguish two cases where the random edge weights satisfy the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) under different scalings. For both cases, we prove convergence to the Gaussian Free Field for the quenched fluctuations. For the annealed version, it had been shown in [arXiv:2507.08560], that Gaussian Free Field fluctuations can be dominated by the much larger fluctuations of the random environment. To access quenched fluctuations we analyze the Schur process with random parameters in a way that allows to prove the annealed CLT for the height function for non i.i.d. weights. We consider specific examples where we determine the asymptotic fluctuations.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Deep Doubly Debiased Longitudinal Effect Estimation with ICE G-Computation

arXiv:2602.12379v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating longitudinal treatment effects is essential for sequential decision-making but is challenging due to treatment-confounder feedback. While Iterative Conditional Expectation (ICE) G-computation offers a principled approach, its recursive structure suffers from error propagation, corrupting the learned outcome regression models. We propose D3-Net, a framework that mitigates error propagation in ICE training and then applies a robust final correction. First, to interrupt error propagation during learning, we train the ICE sequence using Sequential Doubly Robust (SDR) pseudo-outcomes, which provide bias-corrected targets for each regression. Second, we employ a multi-task transformer with a covariate simulator head for auxiliary supervision, regularizing representation learning, and a target network to stabilize training dynamics. For the final estimate, we discard the SDR correction and instead use the uncorrected nuisance models to perform Longitudinal Targeted Minimum Loss-Based Estimation (LTMLE) on the original outcomes. This second-stage, targeted debiasing ensures robustness and optimal finite-sample properties. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model, D3-Net, robustly reduces bias and variance across different horizons, counterfactuals, and time-varying confoundings, compared to existing state-of-the-art ICE-based estimators.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantifying Consistency in LLM Logical Reasoning via Structural Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.17312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can arrive at the same answer through reasoning paths that are unstable, contradictory, or difficult to rank consistently – a failure mode especially prevalent in multi-step deductive reasoning. Existing methods assess reliability primarily through output dispersion – measuring how much sampled answers differ – but this discards a complementary signal: whether the model can consistently rank competing reasoning candidates. We propose structural uncertainty, a consistency-aware framework derived from the stability of self-preference-induced rankings over sampled reasoning solutions. Given a query, we generate multiple candidate solutions and ask the model to judge pairwise preferences among its own outputs. We aggregate self-preferences into ranking distributions via Bradley-Terry modeling with PageRank, and decompose the signal into two entropy-based components: across-trial ranking instability and within-trial candidate ambiguity. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, structural signals provide information complementary to answer dispersion: on logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, the combination improves identification of unreliable instances, while on factual retrieval the structural signal collapses toward uniformity, diagnosing a regime boundary where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is uninformative. The two components relate differently to accuracy: within-trial ambiguity correlates positively with correctness – consistent with settings where multiple plausible solution paths remain competitive – while across-trial instability correlates negatively, signaling unreliable reasoning. Structural uncertainty is best understood not as a universal confidence estimator, but as a regime-sensitive evaluator of logical reasoning consistency.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When is Your LLM Steerable?

Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to control language models' behavior at inference time, but whether it succeeds or fails heavily depends on the prompt, concept, model, and steering configuration. Finding the regime and boundaries of successful steering typically requires expensive grid searches and post-hoc evaluation of full autoregressive rollouts. In this work, we investigate whether steerability can be predicted from the model's internal states at the beginning of the generation process, e.g., after generating the first few tokens, and how to leverage such a predictor to improve steering success rate. To this end, we first introduce ASTEER, a testbed including 1.4M steered generations, spanning 150 concepts with each steering success/failure labeled. Leveraging this testbed, we analyze the model's early decoding dynamics by extracting features that compare hidden states before and after steering across layers and initial decoding steps. These features help us understand how steering's effects propagate along layers and token positions, which provide key information for steerability prediction. We then train a Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDT) classifier on these features to predict whether an intervention will under-steer, succeed, or over-steer without requiring full rollout. Our predictor achieves around 0.7 macro-F1 score on unseen concepts, demonstrating that early hidden states encode substantial, structured information about eventual steering efficacy. We further leverage this steerability predictor as guidance for steering strength searching, achieving near-optimal performance with a small fraction of decoding cost.

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

Spectro-Temporal Interference Confounds Phase Encoding in Spatial Audio Foundation Models

Recent spatial self supervised audio models achieve high performance on localization tasks, raising questions about their encoding of microsecond interaural phase fine structures. We propose a psychoacoustic benchmark based on the binaural masking level difference to evaluate this. Using an equalization cancellation baseline and a GCC PHAT positive control we evaluate nine frozen audio models spanning binaural SSL, monaural SSL, and neural audio codecs. Four monaural negative controls yield zero BMLD confirming binaural specificity. Two general purpose binaural SSL models exhibit minimal phase sensitivity while dedicated binaural spatial SSL models achieve BMLD comparable to the analytical baseline. Progressive physical ablations show that general purpose binaural SSL models rely on spectro temporal interference textures rather than cross channel phase computation. High detection rates in speech reflect a confounding reliance on broadband envelopes rather than genuine phase encoding.

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

Contrastive Geometric Learning Unlocks Unified Structure- and Ligand-Based Drug Design

arXiv:2601.09693v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Structure-based and ligand-based computational drug design have traditionally relied on disjoint data sources and modeling assumptions, limiting their joint use at scale. In this work, we introduce Contrastive Geometric Learning for Unified Computational Drug Design (ConGLUDe), a single contrastive geometric model that unifies structure- and ligand-based training. ConGLUDe couples a geometric protein encoder that produces whole-protein representations and implicit embeddings of predicted binding sites with a fast ligand encoder, removing the need for predefined pockets. By aligning ligands with both global protein representations and multiple candidate binding sites through contrastive learning, ConGLUDe supports ligand-conditioned pocket prediction in addition to virtual screening and target fishing, while being trained jointly on protein-ligand complexes and large-scale bioactivity data. Across diverse benchmarks, ConGLUDe achieves competitive zero-shot virtual screening performance, substantially outperforms existing methods on a challenging target fishing task, and demonstrates state-of-the-art ligand-conditioned pocket selection. These results highlight the advantages of unified structure-ligand training and position ConGLUDe as a step toward general-purpose foundation models for drug discovery.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

FOCUS: DLLMs Know How to Tame Their Compute Bound

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

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SegmentAnyTreeV2: Scaling Transformer-Based Tree Instance Segmentation Across Sensors, Platforms, and Forests

We present SegmentAnyTreeV2, a sensor- and platform-agnostic framework for semantic and instance segmentation of forest point clouds. The model combines a serialization-based Point Transformer v3 backbone with a lightweight semantic head and a tree-focused cross-attention mask decoder. Semantic predictions restrict instance decoding to tree-class voxels, while instance-aware query initialization, one-to-many seed supervision, and asymmetric mask scoring improve separation in dense and structurally complex stands. We further introduce FOR-instance v3, an expanded benchmark comprising 427 scenes and 26,496 annotated trees across diverse biomes, forest structures, and LiDAR platforms. On the FOR-instanceV2 test split, SegmentAnyTreeV2 achieves 90.5% precision, 80.2% recall, 85.0% F1, 90.7% coverage, and 87.6% semantic mIoU, outperforming previous learning-based methods in both instance detection and mask completeness. Zero-shot evaluation on independent sites further demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GeoDisaster: Benchmarking Orchestrated Agents for Operational Disaster Geo-Intelligence

Remote-sensing vision-language models (RS-VLMs) have advanced Earth-observation analysis toward visual interpretation and instruction-following, yet fall short of operational geo-intelligence, which demands tool-grounded spatial reasoning and structured, evidence-backed decisions. We introduce GeoDisaster, an operational geospatial disaster reasoning benchmark with 2,921 verified instances across 43 question types and five task families: deforestation monitoring, multi-hazard analysis, building-damage assessment, flood-safe routing, and Sentinel-1 SAR flood monitoring. Instances integrate heterogeneous EO/GIS evidence-optical and SAR imagery, raster masks, vector geometries, road networks, and exposure layers-spanning hazard detection, damage assessment, exposure estimation, and diagnostic report generation. Ground-truth answers are grounded in executable geospatial workflows and deterministic consistency checks, removing the need for language-model annotation. We further propose an orchestrated multi-agent framework with 18 disaster-oriented tools, where role-specialized agents coordinate through explicit execution contracts, aligned via Role-Contract Expectation Alignment (RCEA): failure-aware supervised fine-tuning combined with contract-grounded reinforcement learning over dense step-level signals. Experiments show that GeoDisaster challenges existing RS-VLMs and agentic systems, while RCEA improves tool use, evidence grounding, state consistency, and decision generation.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

LLMs on Tabular Data with Limited Semantics: Evidence from Industrial Car Retrofit Prediction

arXiv:2606.15314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Industrial retrofit planning depends on structured operational data rather than free text: planners must estimate whether a newly registered prototype will require a retrofit, which retrofit package it will need, and how long the work will take. We study an industrial dataset linking a prototype-registration system (284,271 vehicles) with a retrofit-management system (48,716 cleaned visits), and compare strong tabular machine learning baselines with three LLM-based strategies on row-serialized inputs: embedding features (Amazon Titan), direct prompted classification (Claude Sonnet 4), and an ML+LLM stacking approach. Across binary occurrence prediction, 15-way retrofit-type classification, per-visit duration regression, and an aggregated monthly benchmark, classical tree ensembles remain the strongest standalone models. However, the LLM results reveal a consistent pattern: embeddings remain useful on tables (binary AUC = 0.982), direct prompting collapses once semantic signal is stripped by hashing (binary AUC = 0.500; multiclass weighted F1 = 0.018), and hybrid stacking yields the best manually built multiclass model (weighted F1 = 0.626). On the monthly benchmark, lag-based machine learning outperforms time-series foundation models, though Chronos-small remains competitive in zero-shot forecasting. The results suggest that on privacy-constrained industrial tables, LLMs are more effective as complementary components than as replacements for strong tabular baselines.

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

Single-Round Clustered Federated Learning via Data Collaboration Analysis for Non-IID Data

arXiv:2601.09304v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed learning across multiple clients without sharing raw data. When statistical heterogeneity across clients is severe, Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) can im-prove performance by grouping similar clients and training cluster-wise models. However, most CFL approaches rely on multiple communication rounds for cluster estimation and model updates, which limits their practicality under tight constraints on communication rounds. We propose Data Collaboration-based Clustered Federated Learning (DC-CFL), a single-round framework that completes both client clustering and cluster-wise learning, using only the information shared in DC analysis. DC-CFL quantifies inter-client similarity via total variation distance between label distributions, estimates clusters using hierarchical clustering, and performs cluster-wise learning via DC analysis. Experiments on multiple open datasets under representative non-IID conditions show that DC-CFL achieves accuracy comparable to multi-round baselines while requiring only one communication round. These results indicate that DC-CFL is a practical alternative for collaborative AI model development when multiple communication rounds are impractical. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/souta-suga/DC-CFL.

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

WorkflowPerturb: Calibrated Stress Tests for Evaluating Multi-Agent Workflow Metrics

arXiv:2602.17990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems that generate structured workflows from natural-language requests are now deployed in production across cloud automation, DevOps, and enterprise process orchestration. Operating such systems exposes a recurring change-management problem. Routine updates, such as re-running the same input, swapping the underlying LLM, or refactoring an agent's prompt or orchestration code, frequently produce workflows that differ substantially from previously validated references. Engineers are then left without a principled way to decide whether a change is safe to ship. Automatic workflow evaluation is the natural tool for answering this question. In practice, however, metric scores are poorly calibrated, and a numeric change rarely communicates the severity of the underlying degradation. We introduce WorkflowPerturb, a controlled benchmark for studying workflow evaluation metrics by applying realistic, graded perturbations to golden workflows. WorkflowPerturb contains 4,973 golden workflows and 44,757 perturbed variants across three perturbation types (Missing Steps, Compressed Steps, and Description Changes), each applied at severity levels of 10%, 30%, and 50%. We benchmark multiple metric families and analyze their sensitivity and calibration using expected score trajectories and residuals. Our results characterize systematic differences across metric families and support severity-aware interpretation of workflow evaluation scores in change-management settings. Our dataset will be released upon acceptance.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Self-Questioning Vision-Language Models: Reinforcement Learning for Compositional Visual Reasoning

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are AI systems that process both images and text, yet they often struggle with compositional visual reasoning questions that require chaining multiple steps together, such as identifying objects, counting them, and comparing the results. Existing approaches improve this reasoning by training models on human-written step-by-step explanations, but creating these annotations is expensive and difficult to scale. We propose a self-questioning framework that trains a VLM to break visual questions into smaller sub-questions and answer each one before producing a final response, using a reinforcement learning algorithm called Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). The model is never shown examples of how to decompose questions, it discovers this behavior on its own, guided by a reward signal that scores whether the output contains sub-questions and whether the final answer is correct. We apply this framework to a 3-billion-parameter model, training on both synthetic scenes of geometric shapes (CLEVR) and real-world photographs (A-OKVQA). On A-OKVQA, both self-questioning and standard reinforcement learning substantially improve accuracy over the untrained model (52.2% and 51.6% vs. 46.8%). We introduce the first self-questioning VLM by rewarding not only the final answer like standard RL but additionally for generating intermediate sub-questions, enabling it to discover compositional decomposition strategies. These results suggest that teaching AI systems to ask themselves intermediate questions is a promising strategy for complex visual reasoning, particularly when the difficulty of a question warrants explicit step-by-step decomposition.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

STITCH links cellular morphology and gene expression in spatial transcriptomics

In situ spatial (ISS) sequencing can uncover co-variation between cellular morphology and gene expression in vivo. However, a principled and interpretable mathematical representation of morphology has not yet been applied in this context. In particular, current deep learning-based representations of cell images confound a cell's shape with its size. We present an interpretable representation of cellular boundary contours, based on tangent principal component analysis (TPCA) in a Kendall shape manifold, that captures size-independent contour shape features. This approach successfully recovers shape-perturbing genes in an RNAi screen than a previous metric geometry-based approach. We build on TPCA to develop STITCH (Shape-TranscriptomIc Correlation and Harmonization), an approach to reveal covariation between cell morphology with gene expression in ISS datasets. In a Xenium dataset, STITCH outperforms a deep learning-based approach in both recovering the layered organization of keratinocytes and a spatial gradient in nuclear eccentricity. Across samples in a melanoma CosMx dataset, STITCH reproducibly associates elongated and triangular fibroblasts with proximity to malignant cells and myofibroblast-like transcriptional program. Finally, STITCH independently recovers a known link between mesenchymal-like malignant cell states and increased cell area in two melanoma cohorts. STITCH can thus yield interpretable morphology-transcriptome relationships across cell types, patients, and spatial transcriptomics platforms.

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

Beyond Retrieval: Learning Compact User Representations for Scalable LLM Personalization

Personalizing large language models requires adapting model behavior to individual users while preserving robustness and deployment-scale efficiency. Existing approaches typically personalize LLMs either at the input level, by retrieving user histories or constructing profile prompts, or at the parameter level, by maintaining user-specific parameter-efficient modules. The former makes personalization sensitive to retrieval quality and prompt design, whereas the latter incurs storage and maintenance costs that grow with the user population. To address these limitations, we propose TAP-PER (Temporal Attentive Prefix for PERsonalization), a prefix-based framework that encodes user preferences as learnable representations, eliminating explicit prompt construction and replacing heavy per-user adapters with lightweight user-state prefix embeddings. Inspired by personalized recommendation systems, TAP-PER decomposes user modeling into user-state and query-conditioned components, and incorporates temporal signals to capture the evolving nature of user interests. Experiments on six LaMP tasks show that TAP-PER consistently outperforms prompt-based and model-based baselines across classification, rating, and generation settings. Moreover, TAP-PER uses 130x fewer per-user parameters than OPPU and roughly half the total parameter footprint of PER-PCS at the 1,000-user scale, demonstrating that scalable LLM personalization can be achieved without explicit prompt construction or heavy per-user adapters.

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

The Program Is Still There: A Conservation Law for Program Discovery

arXiv:2606.13799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding the shortest program that generates a sequence is uncomputable, and for six decades that fact has been mistaken for a wall around finding any generating program. It is not a wall but a price, and this paper measures it. For every algorithm that learns about a candidate program only through its score, a class spanning Levin search, evolutionary methods, simulated annealing, and the cross-entropy method, we define the coupling width of a search problem and prove an unconditional worst-case lower bound, exponential in that width with base one less than the domain size. From it follows a conservation law: structural knowledge injected into a search trades one for one against the search it removes, and their sum can never fall below the length of the program sought. Levin's 1973 upper bound and the lower bound proved here are the two ends of one conserved quantity, closing on each other as the instruction set grows. The only escape is to read a candidate's structure rather than its score, and its price, which we prove for generic targets, is incompleteness. A deterministic engine built on this theory recovers a generating program, certified by compressing its data and predicting an unseen continuation, for 2,383 of 3,914 sequences across four independent populations, including 244 of the 256 elementary cellular automata, with measured discovery cost rising along program length more than an order of magnitude inside the score-oracle worst case.

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

Libra: Efficient Resource Management for Agentic RL Post-Training

arXiv:2606.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a standard post-training paradigm for shaping large language models (LLMs) into capable agents. In agentic RL, the rollout stage generates trajectories while invoking tools, producing long-tailed and non-stationary workloads that expose two fundamental challenges in resource management. First, due to the long-tail distribution, a small fraction of trajectories dominates rollout makespan. Second, rollout and training are subject to cross-stage imbalance, as they exhibit strong asymmetry in compute patterns, memory demands, and sensitivity to sequence length. Compounding this asymmetry, the sequence length distribution drifts continuously as the policy evolves, rendering any static resource split progressively suboptimal. We present Libra, a resource management system to address both challenges via two core mechanisms. The first is a global resource planner that jointly optimizes GPU allocation across rollout and training clusters. It leverages an elastic hybrid pool to enable lightweight, non-blocking worker reallocation between stages. The second is a causality-driven multi-level feedback queue (C-MLFQ) scheduler, which routes requests to heterogeneous rollout buckets based on causal signals derived from tool-return outcomes, rather than relying on fragile length predictions. Evaluated on 48 A800 GPUs, Libra achieves up to 3.0x higher throughput and converges up to 2.5x faster in reward compared to the baselines.

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

How Far Can Chord-Symbol Time-Series Adaptation Carry Genre Identity? Capabilities and Boundaries in Multi-Genre Chord-Symbol Modeling

作者:

arXiv:2606.07334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This report treats chord-symbol sequences as an interpretable, controllable time series for genre-local harmonic modeling. The frozen Music Transformer base - released as a pop-jazz fine-tune endpoint but verified in this revision weight-identical to the pop-only Phase-0 baseline, so all gains are measured over a pure-pop prior (see Changes in v2) - is extended to eleven target genres: blues, bossa nova, Bach chorales, country, electronic, folk, funk, gospel, hip-hop, R&B/soul, and rock. The main evaluation compares LoRA, IA3, BitFit, prefix tuning, and full fine-tuning over 11 genres and 3 seeds, a complete 165-cell grid. All five methods improve over the frozen base on held-out chord prediction (macro gains +2.89 to +3.61 percentage points); LoRA and IA3 score highest, but pairwise Wilcoxon tests with Holm and Benjamini-Hochberg correction do not support a decisive winner. A matched-data-size control sharpens this: at a common corpus size IA3 stays on top while LoRA drops to last, so the small method gaps are partly data-driven rather than representational. A control-token baseline is also strong, and wrong-genre adapters often beat the frozen base, suggesting the adaptation effect is largely lightweight conditioning over a reusable harmonic base rather than genre-specific adapter memory. Further diagnostics (rank sweeps, wrong-genre rotation, a base-checkpoint ablation that v2 reinterprets as a same-weights control, chord-only genre classification, output-distribution statistics, real-song evaluation, duplicate analysis) support a bounded conclusion: chord-symbol adaptation reliably improves genre-local harmonic prediction, but chord symbols alone do not carry complete genre identity. Perceived genre authenticity and musical quality are left to controlled listener evaluation.

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

A theory of learning data statistics in diffusion models, from easy to hard

arXiv:2603.12901v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models, their learning dynamics remain poorly understood. We address this issue first by empirically showing that standard diffusion models trained on natural images exhibit a distributional simplicity bias, learning simple, pair-wise input statistics before specializing to higher-order correlations. We reproduce this behaviour in simple denoisers trained on a minimal data model, the mixed cumulant model, where we precisely control both pair-wise and higher-order correlations of the inputs. We identify a scalar invariant of the model that governs the sample complexity of learning pair-wise and higher-order correlations that we call the diffusion information exponent, in analogy to related invariants in different learning paradigms. Using this invariant, we prove that the denoiser learns simple, pair-wise statistics of the inputs at linear sample complexity, while more complex higher-order statistics, such as the fourth cumulant, require at least cubic sample complexity. We also prove that the sample complexity of learning the fourth cumulant is linear if pair-wise and higher-order statistics share a correlated latent structure. Our work describes a key mechanism for how diffusion models can learn distributions of increasing complexity.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

AI Coding Agents Can Reproduce Social Science Findings

Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that AI coding agents can reproduce published findings when provided with original data and code; yet systematic evaluation across social sciences remains limited. Existing evaluation benchmarks are insufficient, either small or conflate agent performance with problems in the reproduction materials themselves, such as code that fails to execute correctly. Here we introduce SocSci-Repro-Bench, a benchmark of 221 tasks spanning four disciplines and 13 substantive domains, constructed from studies whose results are either fully reproducible with available materials or demonstrably non-reproducible due to missing data, allowing us to isolate agents' reproduction capacity. Evaluating two frontier coding agents, Claude Code and Codex, we find that both can reproduce a large share of social science findings, with Claude Code substantially outperforming Codex. These reproduction rates considerably exceed those previously reported for general-purpose LLM-based agents on comparable reproducibility benchmarks. Both agents also perform strongly on a reasoning task requiring identification of underlying research questions, and additional analyses suggest that results are not primarily driven by memorization. Providing the original paper PDF alongside replication materials modestly improves performance but introduces bias on tasks where reproduction is impossible. We also show that agents can be nudged toward confirmatory specification search through subtle prompt framing. Together, these findings suggest that at least some frontier coding agents can serve as reliable executors of computational workflows while underscoring the need for careful benchmarking and prompt design as AI systems assume larger roles in scientific production.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Partial Ring Scan: Revisiting Scan Order in Vision State Space Models

State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as efficient alternatives to attention for vision tasks, offering lineartime sequence processing with competitive accuracy. Vision SSMs, however, require serializing 2D images into 1D token sequences along a predefined scan order, a factor often overlooked. We show that scan order critically affects performance by altering spatial adjacency, fracturing object continuity, and amplifying degradation under geometric transformations such as rotation. We present Partial RIng Scan Mamba (PRISMamba), a rotation-robust traversal that partitions an image into concentric rings, performs order-agnostic aggregation within each ring, and propagates context across rings through a set of short radial SSMs. Efficiency is further improved via partial channel filtering, which routes only the most informative channels through the recurrent ring pathway while keeping the rest on a lightweight residual branch. On ImageNet-1K, PRISMamba achieves 84.5% Top-1 with 3.9G FLOPs and 3,054 img/s on A100, outperforming VMamba in both accuracy and throughput while requiring fewer FLOPs. It also maintains performance under rotation, whereas fixed-path scans drop by 1~2%. These results highlight scan-order design, together with channel filtering, as a crucial, underexplored factor for accuracy, efficiency, and rotation robustness in Vision SSMs. Code will be released upon acceptance.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contact-Based Fringe Projection Profilometry for High-Resolution 3-D Surface Measurement of Reflective and Transparent Objects

This paper presents a contact-based 3-D surface measurement method based on a Digital Fringe Projection (DFP) system, belonging to the vision-based tactile sensing family pioneered by the commercially successful GelSight sensor. Such sensors have proven effective for robotic fingertip manipulation and contact sensing. However, because GelSight employs photometric stereo with RGB LEDs, it does not measure absolute depth directly but instead infers it by integrating estimated surface gradients, which can accumulate reconstruction errors; in addition, it becomes increasingly difficult to calibrate as the sensing area grows, and its depth accuracy is challenged on highly reflective or transparent objects. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a fringe-projection-based contact measurement technique that performs triangulation-based 3-D reconstruction on a coated silicone contact surface, providing dense per-pixel surface geometry and full-field 3-D shape measurement over the contact region. By integrating high-accuracy digital fringe projection into the sensor, our approach simplifies calibration over larger areas and enhances depth precision for complex surfaces. Experimental results, including a direct comparison with a GelSight Mini sensor, a sphere-fitting accuracy evaluation, and an uncertainty analysis, confirm that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy and stability of structured-light-based 3-D measurements, allowing reliable reconstruction of objects with diverse optical properties.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TuneAhead: Predicting Fine-tuning Performance Before Full Training Begins

arXiv:2606.17660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is compute-intensive and error-prone: model performance depends sensitively on data quality and hyperparameter choices, and naïve runs can even degrade model performance. This raises a practical question:can we predict fine-tuning performance before committing to a full training run? We present TUNEAHEAD, a lightweight framework for pre-hoc prediction of fine-tuning performance. TUNEAHEAD encodes each candidate run as a meta-feature vector that combines static dataset descriptors with dynamic probe features from a short standardized probe. A predictor maps these features to performance estimates, while SHAP-based attributions provide interpretable diagnostics that reveal which specific features drive the prediction. Across 1,300+ fine-tuning runs on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TUNEAHEAD consistently outperforms strong baselines such as Early-Stop Extrapolation and ProxyLM. On a held-out test set of 370 runs, TUNEAHEAD achieves an RMSE of 1.47 percentage points and places 95.1% of predictions within +3/-3 percentage points of the true score. These accurate continuous predictions support practical go/no-go screening policies that can reduce unnecessary full fine-tuning while retaining most promising runs.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Free-Placement Optimization of Ground Station Locations for Low-Earth Orbit Satellites

arXiv:2606.12667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapidly expanding low Earth orbit satellite constellations are placing increasing demands on terrestrial ground networks, motivating the development of more efficient ground station network designs. Current approaches select sites from predefined locations, limiting optimization to existing infrastructure and constraining performance. In contrast, free-placement optimization operates over a continuous spatial domain on Earth, broadening the search space and allowing higher-throughput configurations at the cost of potentially requiring new infrastructure deployment. In this work, we introduce SCORE (Sequential Cyclic Optimization via Refinement & Evaluation), a two-stage free-placement method for ground station design. SCORE combines sequential coordinate selection with cyclic refinement to manage high-dimensionality, non-convexity, and local minima that challenge global optimizers. We benchmark SCORE against one-shot methods such as differential evolution (DE) and integer programming approaches using locations from Kongsberg Satellite Services and the World Teleport Association. Tests across two commercial Earth observation constellations (Capella Space and ICEYE) and one synthetic Walker-Star constellation show that SCORE requires up to 5x fewer function evaluations to converge relative to DE while improving downlink throughput by up to 13%. Compared to fixed-site methods, unconstrained SCORE achieves up to 15% greater total downlink, establishing a strong empirical performance benchmark for flexible placement; infrastructure-constrained SCORE retains over 92% of this gain while restricting placement to within proximity of existing fiber and power infrastructure. We also explore trade-offs between expanding existing stations and deploying new sites, informing future ground network design for operational constellations.

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

Your AI Travel Agent Would Book You a Bullfight: An Agentic Benchmark for Implicit Animal Welfare in Frontier AI Models

AI agents are moving from advisors to actors, booking travel, planning menus, and running procurement on behalf of users. Existing benchmarks for AI and animal welfare evaluate model text responses to question-answer prompts, leaving open whether the welfare reasoning surfaced in those responses transfers to agentic deployment where the model must take actions with tools. We introduce TAC (Travel Agent Compassion), the first agentic benchmark measuring whether AI agents avoid options involving animal exploitation when acting on behalf of users. TAC presents an AI agent with twelve hand-authored travel booking scenarios across six categories of animal exploitation, augmented to forty-eight samples to control for price, rating, and position confounds. We evaluate seven frontier models from four labs. Every model scores below the chance level of sixty-four percent, with the best performer (Claude Opus 4.7) at fifty-three percent. A single welfare-aware sentence in the system prompt yields gains of forty-seven to sixty-three percentage points in Claude and GPT-5.5, twenty-six points in GPT-5.2, and under twelve points in DeepSeek and Gemini. An auxiliary Inspect Scout audit of 288 base-condition transcripts from the top two performers, using Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite as judge, flags zero transcripts for evaluation awareness, suggesting the below-chance rates do not stem from the models recognising the evaluation. We discuss implications for category-level variation across cultural domains, the limits of text-response welfare benchmarks, and the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice systemic risk framework.