Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Adaptive Volumetric Mechanical Property Fields Invariant to Resolution

Accurate mechanical properties (or materials) Young's modulus ($E$), Poisson's ratio ($\nu$) and density ($\rho$) are essential for reliable physics simulation of digital worlds, but most 3D assets lack this information. We propose AdaVoMP, a method for predicting accurate dense spatially-varying ($E$, $\nu$, $\rho$) for input 3D objects across representations, improving the resolution, accuracy, and memory efficiency over the state-of-the-art. The foundation of our technique is a sparse and adaptive voxel structure SAV that efficiently represents both the input 3D shape and the material field output. We replace the fixed-voxel model of the most accurate prior method, VoMP, with a novel sparse transformer encoder-decoder model that learns to generate a unique SAV autoregressively for every input shape to represent its materials, achieving a resolution $16^3\times$ higher than prior art. Experiments show that AdaVoMP estimates more accurate volumetric properties, even with lesser test-time compute than all prior art. This allows us to convert high-resolution complex 3D objects into simulation-ready assets, resulting in realistic deformable simulations.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Hamiltonian description of nonreciprocal interactions

arXiv:2505.05246v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In a vast class of systems, which includes members as diverse as sedimenting particles and bird flocks, interactions do not stem from a potential, and are in general nonreciprocal. Thus, it is not possible to define a conventional energy function, nor to use analytical or numerical tools that rely on it. Here, we overcome these limitations by constructing a Hamiltonian that includes auxiliary degrees of freedom; when subject to a constraint, this Hamiltonian yields the original nonreciprocal dynamics. We show that Glauber dynamics based on the constrained Hamiltonian reproduce both stationary and nonstationary states of the original Langevin dynamics, as we explicitly illustrate for dissipative XY spins with vision-cone interactions. Further, the symplectic structure inherent to our construction enables us to apply the well-developed notions of Hamiltonian engineering, which we demonstrate by varying the amplitude of a periodic drive to tune the spin interactions between those of a square and a chain lattice geometry. Overall, our framework for generic nonreciprocal pairwise interactions paves the way for bringing to bear the full conceptual and methodological power of conventional statistical mechanics and Hamiltonian dynamics to nonreciprocal systems.

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

When Correct Edges Cannot Be Verified: A Provenance Gap in Incomplete KGQA and a Provenance-Favoring Completion Policy

Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering (IKGQA) requires completing missing edges to continue reasoning. A growing line of work verifies completed edges against retrieved text, treating textual support as a proxy for edge quality. We ask a question that, to our knowledge, has not been systematically tested: does textual verifiability actually track correctness? Exploiting the gold deleted triples provided by the standard random-deletion protocol, we measure both. The finding is counterintuitive: among gold-correct completed edges, 76-96% have no supporting passage even under exhaustive retrieval, robustly across deletion rates (20%/40%), datasets (CWQ/WebQSP), and relation types (structural, commonsense, long-tail). Most Freebase-style facts simply do not occur as head-tail co-mentions in text. Textual faithfulness therefore measures provenance, not correctness – separated by a paradigm-level gap no in-corpus retrieval closes. This reframes edge completion. Since most completed edges – correct or not – are causally redundant for the answer (95-97% of correct answers do not depend on any unsupported edge), the central question shifts from "is the edge correct?" to "admit or abstain under provenance uncertainty?" Within this framing we present TGComplete, a provenance-favoring admission policy that retrieves evidence at a reasoning breakpoint, verifies a candidate through a lightweight loop, and abstains when support is absent. Against the generate-to-complete baseline GoG, it attains higher edge precision against gold (15-21% vs 3-14%), with no statistically detectable EM loss and 3.1-7.4 times higher strict faithfulness of admitted edges – at the cost of lower recall. We position TGComplete not as uniformly better, but as a principled point on a precision/provenance-recall trade-off, appropriate when auditability matters.

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

Divination by Prompt: LLM-Mediated Xuanxue on Chinese Social Media

arXiv:2606.12418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has produced a striking cultural practice: using conversational AI for divination. This paper offers one of the first systematic studies of LLM-mediated divination in the context of Xuanxue, an internet-native umbrella term for mystical and spiritual practices on Chinese social media. Using a mixed-methods design, we analyze 23000+ posts and comments from Xiaohongshu and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with users and professional diviners. Users primarily consult LLMs about pragmatic concerns - romantic relationships, careers, exams, and in-game gacha draws - via two intersecting pathways: trend-driven curiosity enabled by viral visibility and zero-cost access, and event-driven anxiety under conditions of uncertainty. A defining feature is collaborative prompt refinement, which turns users into active prompt engineers. Among commenters expressing a clear stance, perceived efficacy skews positive, with "accuracy" often justified through biographical fit and retrospective confirmation, consistent with Barnum and confirmation bias. Users also develop verification practices such as repeated trials and cross-model comparison. Professional diviners, by contrast, portray LLMs as lacking the "spiritual power" required for genuine divination, reflecting both ontological commitments and economic boundary-work. We also show how participants navigate tensions between scientific and metaphysical frames when interpreting AI-generated readings. Situating these findings in anthropological and cognitive-evolutionary theories of divination, we argue that LLM divination preserves core functions of traditional practice while introducing scalability, repeatability, and prompt-driven co-production that reshape how divinatory authority is constructed and evaluated.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

How do Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Vision Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.

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

Computational Methods and Challenges in Cell-Free DNA Analysis for Multi-Cancer Early Detection

arXiv:2606.20174v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cell-free DNA (cfDNA) is a promising avenue for non-invasive multicancer early detection (MCED), in that, it can enable multiple cancer detection simultaneously from a single blood draw, with particular sensitivity to cancers that currently lack established screening programs. Here we review the computational methods developed between 2022 and 2025 for cfDNA-based MCED. We focus on how fragmentomics and epigenetic features are extracted and analyzed to detect cancer at early stages. We first briefly outline the biological basis of cfDNA signals, then review classical statistical and machine learning approaches alongside deep learning frameworks including autoencoder-based models. For each method we discuss biological interpretability, validation strategy, and readiness for clinical integration. Furthermore, we categorize the current challenges into technical, computational, and methodological while outlining open problems in the field. This review shows that multimodal ensemble approaches have the strongest promise for clinical integration and the highest readiness. However, for better assessment of future work and side-by-side comparison, standardization of evaluation protocols and reporting results will be crucial.

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

Online LLM Selection via Constrained Bandits with Time-Varying Demand

arXiv:2606.17489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in edge-cloud inference systems to handle diverse user tasks with heterogeneous accuracy, latency, and cost profiles. Selecting the appropriate LLM for each incoming task is critical for ensuring service quality and efficient resource utilization. However, model heterogeneity, stochastic and unknown performance characteristics, and time-varying task demands make static selection strategies inadequate. Real-world deployments often impose hard resource budgets such as monetary expenditure limits, along with soft service-level requirements such as latency guarantees. These constraints introduce additional challenges for online decision-making. We formulate this problem as a constrained stochastic bandit learning task, where the learner sequentially selects models under both packing-type (hard) and covering-type (soft) constraints, while adapting to time-varying task demand. The learner operates without access to the underlying reward, cost, or latency distributions and must rely on partial feedback. We develop a novel online learning algorithm that leverages confidence-bound estimates and demand predictions to balance reward maximization with long-term constraint satisfaction. We provide theoretical guarantees showing sublinear regret and sublinear covering constraint violations compared to an offline benchmark with full information. Experimental results on synthetic workloads demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in dynamic, resource-constrained environments.

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

Initiation of Superradiance from Different Collective Spin States

arXiv:2606.14949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superradiance is an extensive cooperative spontaneous emission phenomenon. Some atomic collective spin states exhibit it. However, distinct initial states differ in their decay dynamics. Dicke states with different numbers of excitations have their peak emission intensity shifted in time depending on the number of excitations. Emission intensity in atomic coherent states depends on their polarization. Some specific states undergo a squeezing controlled crossover, making the emission character dependent on the amount of squeezing in the state. We present detailed results on the superradiant dynamics of a representative selection of Dicke states. For large N, we are able to predict fairly accurately the pulse profile in each case using the mean field approximation, an approach based on the Fokker Planck Equation. We also present results on the intensity correlation function of the emission.

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

Improved Knowledge Distillation for Land-Use Image Classification

In the present article, an improved Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework has been proposed for efficient compression of deep convolutional neural networks for land-use image classification task. Motivated by the need to achieve competitive classification accuracy while reducing computational complexity, a teacher-student learning paradigm is adopted in which a VGG16 network transfers knowledge to a lightweight MobileNetV2 model. The proposed framework integrates hard supervision from ground truth labels with a soft supervision strategy that combines Kullback-Leibler divergence and Cosine Similarity losses. Experiments conducted on three land-use datasets show that the proposed KD-based method yields improved performance, and achieves an accuracy of 99.04%, outperforming both baseline student training and single-loss distillation approaches, while retaining substantial model compression.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Making Models Unmergeable via Scaling-Sensitive Loss Landscape

arXiv:2601.21898v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rise of model hubs has made it easier to access reusable model components, making model merging a practical tool for combining capabilities. Yet, this modularity also creates a governance gap: downstream users can recompose released weights into unauthorized mixtures that bypass safety alignment or licensing terms. Because existing defenses are largely post-hoc and architecture-specific, they provide inconsistent protection across diverse architectures and release formats in practice. To close this gap, we propose Trap$^2$, an architecture-agnostic protection framework that encodes protection into updates during fine-tuning, regardless of whether they are released as adapters or full models. Instead of relying on architecture-dependent approaches, Trap$^2$ uses weight re-scaling as a simple proxy for the merging process. It keeps released weights effective in standalone use, but degrades them under re-scaling that often arises in merging, undermining unauthorized recomposition.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Theory of Training Profit-Optimal LLMs

arXiv:2605.16430v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling LLMs requires tremendous computational resources, and recent advances in AI have gone hand in hand with massive amounts of capital expenditure. While it is established that scaling up LLMs reliably increases model quality (quantified in terms of loss or downstream evaluations), it is unclear how these quality improvements translate to potential revenue, and whether revenue increases would offset costs of larger-scale training and inference. In this work, we develop an economic model for characterizing the rational behavior of an LLM training firm by combining scaling laws with microeconomic theory. Under our model of firm behavior, LLM quality can be increased with more parameters and training tokens, leading to more potential adoption by consumers, who each have a quality threshold for using the LLM. On the other hand, additional parameters and training tokens both incur additional costs. We analyze the profit maximization problem for this model under compute-bound and data-bound regimes. In the compute-bound regime, optimal model size and token budget track hardware efficiency $E$ (FLOPs/\$) at a near-linear rate; total training cost then scales sub-quadratically in $E$. Data efficiency improvements incentivize larger models and training expenditure. When we are limited to $D$ data, profit-optimal training expenditure scales as $D^2/E$, i.e, increase with data and decreases with hardware efficiency (as well as data efficiency). Finally, we analyze practical trends in training expenditure: current trends are consistent with our most permissive model variants in the compute-bound regime, but are not profit-optimal in the data-bound regime or assuming hardware advances will stall. Overall, our results provide a theory of profit-optimal LLM training, providing a foundation for engaging critically with industry statements and supporting long-term economic decision making.

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

Style-CCL: Content-Preserving Style Transfer via Curriculum Continual Learning

Content-Preserving Style transfer, given content and style references, remains challenging for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) due to entangled content and style features. With a reverse triplet synthesis pipeline to build a million-scale training set and a dual-branch Style-Content DiT (SC-DiT) that decouples style and content via separate ROPE embeddings and causal masking, we observe that such a one-stage training paradigm on mixed style categories causes semantic styles to dominate, hindering texture style learning, and harming content preservation. To address these issues, we propose Style-CCL, a Multi-Stage Curriculum Continual Learning framework that trains SC-DiT from semantic (easy) to texture (hard) styles, and from clean to synthetic data, with Random Memory Rehearsal across stages to avoid catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Style-CCL achieves state-of-the-art performance in three core metrics: style similarity, content consistency, and aesthetic quality.

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

ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?

World Action Models (WAMs) commonly rely on video generation to bridge visual world modeling and robot control. However, video-based WAMs face three coupled limitations: dense multi-frame future tokens make inference costly, full video prediction spends capacity on action-irrelevant temporal and appearance details, and long-horizon future imagination may introduce errors that mislead action prediction. These issues raise a simple question: Does world action model really need video generation? We propose ImageWAM, a simple WAM framework that repurposes pretrained image editing models for robot action prediction. In contrast to video generation, image editing provides a better-matched prior: it only needs to model a target-frame transformation, focuses on action-relevant current-to-target visual differences, and grounds task instructions to localized visual changes through edit pretraining. In practice, ImageWAM does not decode the target frame at inference time; instead, it conditions a flow-matching action expert on the KV caches produced by image-editing denoising, using them as a compact world-action context. ImageWAM outperforms standard VLA baselines and matching competitive WAMs without additional policy pretraining across different simulator and real-world experiments. It also reduces FLOPs to 1/6 and latency to 1/4 of video-based WAMs. Attention analysis further shows that editing caches focus on task-relevant change regions, supporting image editing as an effective alternative to video-based world-action modeling.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Oranits: Mission Assignment and Task Offloading in Open RAN-based ITS using Metaheuristic and Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2507.19712v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we explore mission assignment and task offloading in an Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN)-based intelligent transportation system (ITS), where autonomous vehicles leverage mobile edge computing for efficient processing. Existing studies often overlook the intricate interdependencies between missions and the costs associated with offloading tasks to edge servers, leading to suboptimal decision-making. To bridge this gap, we introduce Oranits, a novel system model that explicitly accounts for mission dependencies and offloading costs while optimizing performance through vehicle cooperation. To achieve this, we propose a twofold optimization approach. First, we develop a metaheuristic-based evolutionary computing algorithm, namely the Chaotic Gaussian-based Global ARO (CGG-ARO), serving as a baseline for one-slot optimization. Second, we design an enhanced reward-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, referred to as the Multi-agent Double Deep Q-Network (MA-DDQN), that integrates both multi-agent coordination and multi-action selection mechanisms, significantly reducing mission assignment time and improving adaptability over baseline methods. Extensive simulations reveal that CGG-ARO improves the number of completed missions and overall benefit by approximately 7.1% and 7.7%, respectively. Meanwhile, MA-DDQN achieves even greater improvements of 11.0% in terms of mission completions and 12.5% in terms of the overall benefit. These results highlight the effectiveness of Oranits in enabling faster, more adaptive, and more efficient task processing in dynamic ITS environments.

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

Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Nonlinear Matrix Decompositions

arXiv:2512.17473v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present an algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving nonlinear matrix decompositions (NMD). Given an input matrix $X \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$ and a factorization rank $r \ll \min(m, n)$, NMD seeks matrices $W \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times r}$ and $H \in \mathbb{R}^{r \times n}$ such that $X \approx f(WH)$, where $f$ is an element-wise nonlinear function. We evaluate our method on several representative nonlinear models: the rectified linear unit activation $f(x) = \max(0, x)$, suitable for nonnegative sparse data approximation, the component-wise square $f(x) = x^2$, applicable to probabilistic circuit representation, and the MinMax transform $f(x) = \min(b, \max(a, x))$, relevant for recommender systems. The proposed framework flexibly supports diverse loss functions, including least squares, $\ell_1$ norm, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and can be readily extended to other nonlinearities and metrics. We illustrate the applicability, efficiency, and adaptability of the approach on real-world datasets, highlighting its potential for a broad range of applications.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

SproutRAG: Attention-Guided Tree Search with Progressive Embeddings for Long-Document RAG

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems must balance retrieval granularity with contextual coherence, a challenge that existing methods address through LLM-guided chunking, single-level context expansion, or hierarchical summarization. These approaches variously depend on costly LLM calls during indexing or retrieval, limit context aggregation to a single granularity level, or introduce information loss through summarization. We present SproutRAG, an attention-guided hierarchical RAG framework that addresses this trade-off by organizing sentence-level chunks into progressively larger but semantically coherent units, using learned inter-sentence attention to construct a binary chunking tree. Unlike prior approaches that rely on external LLMs, fixed context expansion, or lossy summarization, SproutRAG learns which attention heads and layers best capture semantic document structure, enabling multi-granularity retrieval without additional LLM calls or compressed summaries. At retrieval time, SproutRAG uses hierarchical beam search to retrieve candidates at multiple granularities, capturing multi-sentence relevance beyond flat retrieval. The framework is trained end-to-end with a joint objective that improves both embeddings and tree structure. Experiments across four benchmarks spanning scientific, legal, and open-domain settings demonstrate that SproutRAG improves information efficiency (IE) by 6.1% on average over the strongest baseline. Code is available on https://github.com/AmirAbaskohi/SproutRAG.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Lattice surgery for near-term experimental logical qubit entanglement creation in planar architectures

arXiv:2606.15190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the era of early fault-tolerant quantum computing, basic demonstrations of entanglement operations between a few logical qubits are at the frontier of recent developments in quantum computing. In this work, we describe in detail, at both the logical and physical qubit levels, a logical teleportation protocol between two surface code logical qubits based on lattice surgery. We address several aspects of the teleportation protocol pertinent to superconducting qubit architectures. We explore the modularity constraints in the number and location of stabilizer readouts and compare variants of the teleportation protocol in this regard. Additionally, we investigate potential performance improvements related to in-sequence decision logic and the optimal size of the interface region between two surface code patches on a superconducting chip. Based on our simulations, we show possible near-term improvements in lattice surgery protocols that facilitate fault-tolerant quantum computing in superconducting circuit architectures.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Null-Space Diffusion Distillation Unlocks Speed, Fidelity and Realism in Lensless Imaging

Lensless imaging reconstructs scenes from highly multiplexed measurements, resulting in a severely ill-posed inverse problem. In this work, we identify a fundamental trade-off between measurement consistency, perceptual quality, and inference speed across lensless reconstruction paradigms. Traditional methods favor consistency but produce perceptually degraded results, supervised approaches achieve high-quality reconstructions with fast inference but may violate physical constraints, and diffusion-prior methods achieve high perceptual quality and consistency–particularly when structured constraints such as range-null decomposition are used–but remain slow due to iterative sampling. Motivated by this observation, we propose Null-Space Diffusion Distillation (NSDD), a single-pass reconstruction model that distills structured diffusion-prior inference into an efficient feed-forward network. NSDD learns to produce high-quality reconstructions that preserve measurement consistency while avoiding costly iterative sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that NSDD achieves perceptual quality and consistency competitive with diffusion-prior methods, while providing significantly faster inference and offering a favorable balance across all three objectives. Furthermore, ablation experiments show that distilling the range–null decomposition improves reconstruction quality and robustness over unstructured full-reconstruction distillation, including on unseen real scenes. These results highlight the potential of structure-aware distillation for efficient lensless imaging. Code is available at github.com/JRCSAVSN/NullSpaceDiffusionDistillation.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Unsupervised Diffusion Solver for Combinatorial Optimization via Combinatorial Adjoint Matching

arXiv:2605.30920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based neural solvers have shown strong promise for combinatorial optimization (CO), but existing methods typically rely on supervised training with large collections of near-optimal solutions. In this work, we extend adjoint-based trajectory optimization methods to discrete combinatorial domains. We formulate diffusion-based CO as a stochastic control problem over Continuous-Time Markov Chains and introduce discrete adjoint dynamics for propagating optimization signals through discrete generative trajectories. Building on this formulation, we propose Combinatorial Adjoint Matching (CAM), an unsupervised training framework for discrete diffusion solvers with structured and low-variance trajectory-level optimization signals. Empirically, CAM consistently outperforms existing unsupervised diffusion baselines and achieves performance competitive with strong supervised diffusion solvers and even traditional solvers across diverse combinatorial optimization problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/Shengyu-Feng/CAM.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Talking to Your Data: Exploring Embodied Conversation as an Interface for Personal Health Reflection

arXiv:2606.17767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personal health data from wearables are typically presented through dashboards of charts and summary statistics, requiring users to actively interpret patterns and implications. We explore an alternative interaction paradigm: engaging with personal health data through an embodied conversational agent that facilitates objective data reflection in dialogue with the user. We present a system that combines lightweight preprocessing of wearable data with a Unity-based embodied character. Internally, the system follows a dual-agent design in which an Observer agent extracts descriptive statistics and temporal trends, and a Presenter agent communicates these findings through "spoken statistics," intentionally refraining from clinical advice to isolate the impact of the interaction modality. We evaluate this approach through a simulated-self user study (N=5) using a within-subject design. Participants adopted health personas and goals derived from the LifeSnaps dataset to compare traditional dashboard exploration with embodied conversational reflection. Our evaluation focuses on perceived understanding, the specificity of generated actions, and the cognitive shift from passive viewing to active sensemaking. The paper contributes a functional prototype, a design pattern for objective health data narrative generation, and early empirical insights into how embodiment affects the interpretation of personal health metrics.

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

PlaceRep: Geospatial Place Representation Learning from Large-Scale Point-of-Interest Data

arXiv:2507.02921v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning effective representations of urban environments requires capturing spatial structure beyond fixed administrative boundaries. Existing geospatial representation learning approaches typically aggregate Points of Interest (POIs) into pre-defined administrative regions such as census units or ZIP code areas, assigning a single embedding to each region. However, POIs often form semantically meaningful groups that extend across, within, or beyond these boundaries, defining places that better reflect human activity and urban function. To address this limitation, we propose PlaceRep, a geospatial representation learning method that constructs place-level representations by clustering spatially and semantically related POIs. PlaceRep summarizes large-scale POI graphs from U.S. Foursquare data to produce general-purpose urban region embeddings while automatically identifying places across multiple spatial scales. By eliminating model pre-training, PlaceRep provides a scalable and efficient solution for multi-granular geospatial analysis. Experiments using the tasks of population density estimation and housing price prediction as downstream tasks show that PlaceRep outperforms most state-of-the-art graph-based geospatial representation learning methods and achieves up to a x100 speedup in generating region-level representations on large-scale POI graphs. The implementation of PlaceRep is available at https://github.com/mohammadhashemii/PlaceRep.

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

Adaptive Speech-to-Spike Encoding for Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.19039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The mismatch between continuous acoustic signals and discrete event-driven processing remains a fundamental bottleneck for neuromorphic speech processing. Current systems typically rely on fixed spike encoders, forcing downstream Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to compensate for non-adaptive input representations. To address this, we present a learnable residual speech-to-spike encoder jointly trained end-to-end with a Recurrent Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (R-LIF) backbone. We validate this approach on the Google Speech Commands v2 (GSC-v2) benchmark, achieving up to 94.97% accuracy. Notably, the learned encoder remains highly parameter-efficient with a compact 35k-parameter variant that reaches 89.8%, matching or exceeding prior baselines that require an order of magnitude more parameters. Our encoder-focused analysis, including linear probing and gradient-residual inspection, indicates that the encoder does not target faithful signal reconstruction but instead learns task-aligned spike representations that enhance class separability. Finally, we benchmark bio-inspired, hardware-friendly credit assignment by comparing Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA) with surrogate-gradient BPTT under identical architectures and training conditions. We find that DFA reaches 91.5% accuracy, quantifying the performance trade-off of bio-inspired learning rules for modern neuromorphic audio.

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

UrbanWell: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Spatio-Temporal Urban Wellbeing Analytics

arXiv:2606.15890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding urban wellbeing from multimodal data requires integrating heterogeneous spatial and temporal signals, posing significant challenges for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We introduce UrbanWell, a large-scale benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the spatio-temporal reasoning capabilities of MLLMs for urban wellbeing analytics through joint modeling of satellite and street view imagery. UrbanWell spans 38 cities across multiple years and includes diverse indicators covering (1) environmental conditions (CO$_2$, NO$_2$, PM${2.5}$, and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), (2) spatial accessibility (minimum distance to supermarkets and restaurants), (3) urban form (road length, road density, and land use), (4) urban vitality (population, economic activity diversity, and land use diversity), and (5) subjective perception attributes (e.g., safety, beauty, liveliness, wealth, and quietness). All indicators are aligned at grid level to enable standardized evaluation. Beyond static prediction, UrbanWell defines temporal reasoning tasks, including future value forecasting from historical observations and temporal trend classification. We benchmark 15 state-of-the-art representative MLLMs in a zero-shot setting, providing a comprehensive comparative evaluation across spatial and temporal dimensions. Experimental results indicate that while MLLMs capture salient spatial and perceptual cues, their performance varies substantially across heterogeneous urban indicators spanning environment and subjective perception. UrbanWell serves as a unified benchmark for evaluating multimodal spatial and temporal reasoning in urban wellbeing analytics, offering a standardized testbed for systematic assessment and future research on multimodal urban intelligence. Our codes and datasets are accessible via https://github.com/axin1301/UrbanWell-Benchmark.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

COGNITION: From Evaluation to Defense against Multimodal LLM CAPTCHA Solvers

arXiv:2512.02318v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) undermine the security guarantees of visual CAPTCHA. We identify the attack surface where an adversary can cheaply automate CAPTCHA solving using off-the-shelf models. We evaluate 7 representative MLLMs on 18 real-world CAPTCHA task types, measuring single-shot accuracy, success under limited retries, end-to-end latency, and per-solve cost. We further validate our findings through a supplemental external dataset and an adaptive-attacker setting with session memory, while also analyzing the impact of task-specific prompt engineering and few-shot demonstrations on solver effectiveness. We reveal that MLLMs can reliably solve recognition-oriented and low-interaction CAPTCHA tasks at human-like cost and latency, whereas tasks requiring fine-grained localization, multi-step spatial reasoning, or cross-frame consistency remain significantly harder for current models. By examining the reasoning traces of such MLLMs, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of why models succeed/fail on specific CAPTCHA puzzles and use these insights to derive defense-oriented guidelines for selecting and strengthening CAPTCHA tasks. To validate these principles, we present a proof-of-concept by hardening a vulnerable CAPTCHA type using our guidelines. We demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained localization and implicit counting reduces the success rate of state-of-the-art MLLMs from over 95\% to 0\%, confirming that structural changes can effectively mitigate the threat. We conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for CAPTCHA redesign as MLLM capabilities increasingly threaten existing defenses. Code Availability (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20406852).

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

FORGE: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings

arXiv:2508.20330v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Combinatorial optimization problems are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Still, learning-based approaches to accelerate combinatorial optimization often require solving a large number of difficult instances to collect training data, incurring significant computational cost. Existing learning-based methods require training dedicated models for each problem distribution, for each downstream task, severely limiting their scalability and generalization. We introduce Forge: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings, a framework that pre-trains a vector-quantized graph autoencoder on a large, diverse collection of mixed-integer programming (MIP) instances in an unsupervised manner, without relying on optimization solvers or optimal solutions. Vector quantization produces discrete code assignments that serve as a vocabulary for representing optimization instances. We evaluate Forge in both unsupervised and supervised settings. In the unsupervised setting, Forge embeddings effectively cluster unseen instances across problem domains and sizes. In the supervised setting, we fine-tune Forge embeddings and show that a single pre-trained model helps predicting both the integrality gap for cut-generation and variable hints for search guidance across multiple problem and size distributions. In both tasks, we improve the performance of a commercial optimization solver and outperform state-of-the-art learning-based methods. Finally, we open-source our training code, pre-trained Forge weights, and embeddings for multiple MIP distributions to foster further research in representation learning for optimization problems https://skadio.github.io/forge/