Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Geometric Algebra Quantum Gate Decomposition

arXiv:2606.12480v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum gates are usually described through matrix and tensor-product formalisms that often obscure their geometric structure. In this work, we formulate the Pauli and Clifford groups within the complex Geometric Algebra (GA) framework. We show that the Pauli group is naturally identified with the group of blades up to a global phase, thereby providing a geometric interpretation of Pauli operators and their commutation relations in terms of oriented subspaces. We further prove that Clifford operators are generated by products of {\pi}/4-Pauli rotors and introduce a greedy Pauli rotor decomposition algorithm whose empirical behavior suggests unexpectedly compact decompositions for Clifford operators. Finally, we show that Clifford+T universality admits a natural geometric interpretation through {\pi}/8-rotors within this framework.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

ShipNet: A Geometric Deep Learning Surrogate for Real-Time Ship Hydrodynamics

arXiv:2606.15356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate prediction of hydrodynamic performance is central to ship design, yet high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics remains prohibitively expensive for large-scale parametric exploration. This motivates the development of data-driven surrogate models that provide rapid approximations to hydrodynamic predictions at substantially reduced cost. We present ShipNet, a geometric deep-learning surrogate that predicts both hull-surface pressure distributions and far-field free-surface wave patterns directly from hull geometry and speed. The network employs a regularized dynamic graph convolutional backbone on hull point clouds, with a multi-head decoder for simultaneous near-body pressure and free-surface elevation outputs. Training data consist of 420 inviscid free-surface simulations generated using a potential-flow panel method for two parent yacht hulls, each parameterized into 70 variants and evaluated at three speeds. ShipNet predicts per-point pressure coefficient and two-dimensional wave elevation map using a composite loss that combines point-wise regression and image-structure terms. On a geometry-held-out test set, ShipNet achieves R^2=0.98 for hull pressure and R^2=0.91 for wave fields. Inference requires approximately 0.15s per case, yielding over a 550x speedup relative to the potential-flow solver on conventional hardware. Limitations include the restricted geometry and speed ranges and the inviscid training data, while future work will extend the model to high-fidelity viscous simulations with physics-informed regularization.

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

Hierarchical Control in Multi-Agent Games: LLM-based Planning and RL Execution

arXiv:2606.20014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong performance in sequential decision-making, yet scaling to complex multi-agent environments remains challenging due to sparse rewards, large state-action spaces, and the difficulty of learning coordinated strategies. We propose a hierarchical architecture where a pretrained large language model (LLM) acts as a centralized strategic controller that selects among specialized RL skill policies for a team of agents, while RL policies handle reactive low-level execution. We evaluate this hybrid system in a competitive 2v2 King of the Hill environment against behavior tree (BT) and ``Flat'' RL (end-to-end training without skill decomposition) baselines. The LLM+RL system achieves task performance statistically equivalent to hand-crafted BT (46.4\% vs 51.5\% win rate, $p=0.103$) while both significantly outperform Flat RL trained without skill decomposition. A user study ($n=15$) reveals that 60\% of participants perceive LLM+RL agents as the most human-like ($p=0.027$), citing behavioral adaptability and tactical variability. These results demonstrate that pretrained LLM reasoning can effectively orchestrate pretrained RL skills, achieving competitive multi-agent coordination and superior perceived believability without manual rule engineering.

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

RelayFormer: A Unified Local-Global Attention Framework for Scalable Image and Video Manipulation Localization

Visual manipulation localization (VML) aims to identify tampered regions in images and videos, a task that has become increasingly challenging with the rise of advanced editing tools. Existing methods face two central issues. The first is resolution diversity. Resizing or padding can distort subtle forensic cues and introduce unnecessary computational cost. The second is the difficulty of extending spatial models for images to spatio-temporal inputs in videos, which often results in maintaining separate architectures for the two data types. To address these challenges, we propose RelayFormer, a unified framework that adapts to varying resolutions and naturally handles both static and temporal visual data. RelayFormer partitions inputs into fixed-size sub-images and introduces Global Local Relay (GLR) tokens that propagate structured context through a relay-based attention mechanism. This design enables efficient exchange of global cues, such as semantic or temporal consistency, while preserving fine-grained manipulation artifacts. Unlike prior approaches that depend on uniform resizing or sparse attention, RelayFormer scales to variable resolutions and video sequences with minimal overhead. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate superior performance and strong efficiency, combining resolution adaptivity without interpolation or excessive padding, unified processing for images and videos, and a favorable balance between accuracy and computational cost. Code is available at~\href{https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer}{https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer}.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SirenFNO: Efficient and Full Frequency Learning of Fourier Neural Operators

arXiv:2606.11518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fourier neural operators (FNOs) are effective and efficient surrogates for approximating solutions of PDEs and generalize across discretizations. However, owing to the reliance on frequency truncation to maintain learning efficiency of FNOs, empirical studies suggest that FNOs exhibit spectral bias toward low-frequency information, which may hinder the learning capability especially for certain PDEs with strong high-frequency oscillations. To address this limitation, we propose SirenFNO, a novel framework that leverages sinusoidal representation networks (SIRENs) to learn implicit neural representations and performs mode-wise kernel parameterization. Our SIREN parameterization learns a full-grid spectrum with a constant and discretization-independent parameter count, thereby eliminating the need for frequency truncation. We further extend SirenFNO with functional tensor decompositions to enhance parameter and learning efficiency. Empirical results show that our SirenFNO consistently outperforms FNO with approximately $4$ to $15$ times parameter reductions with preserved discretization invariance, and our functional decomposition variants obtain performance improvements with a maximum of $73$ times fewer parameters across multiple PDE benchmarks.

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

BAFIS: Dataset + Framework to assess occupational Bias and Human Preference in modern Text-to-image Models

Generative artificial intelligence has the potential to improve productivity and transform the production of creative content. However, existing research indicates that image generation models are significantly influenced by biases. This work investigates the inherent biases and language-induced biases present in text-to-image models within the context of occupation-related image generation, complementing established metrics with human preference feedback. We present a comprehensive evaluation of five current text-to-image models: Midjourney v6.1, Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, DALL-E 3, Playground v2.5, and FLUX.1-dev , focusing on gender and ethnicity bias, image quality, and prompt alignment. To facilitate this evaluation, we developed the "Battle-Arena for Fair Image Synthesis" (BAFIS), a platform designed to collect human feedback on bias in generated images. Furthermore, we created a dataset comprising 21,140 synthetic images generated using multilingual prompts, which serves as a basis for our analysis. We further place our results within a broader social context by comparing them to official statistics from the German Federal Employment Agency. Our findings reveal systematic biases in text-to-image models, with established evaluation metrics in partial correlation with subjective user ratings. Thus, our research emphasizes the need for including human preferences to develop fairer and more inclusive text-to-image models.

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

A Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization with Application to Copy Number Analysis in Cancer

arXiv:2606.17491v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Binary data factorization is common, but real-valued methods ignore discreteness and yield hard-to-interpret factors. Boolean Matrix Factorization (BooMF) instead decomposes a binary matrix into two lower-rank binary matrices via logical AND and OR, expressing the data as a Boolean disjunction of interpretable patterns. In cancer genomics, BooMF can reveal coordinated feature changes that may drive tumor evolution, unlike rotational or additive decompositions. Most existing BooMF methods are heuristic, greedy, sensitive to initialization, prone to local optima, and do not support principled model selection or uncertainty quantification. We introduce Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization (BBMF), a fully conjugate generative model with sparsity-inducing priors. It enforces Boolean constraints, yields interpretable latent factors with coherent uncertainty quantification, and admits Gibbs sampling with closed-form full conditionals. Because cancer evolution often involves widespread, near-simultaneous chromosome-number changes (e.g., whole-genome duplication followed by instability and selection), Boolean factorizations capture these patterns more naturally than additive models. Applied to arm-level copy-number alteration data in multiple myeloma, where entries indicate presence/absence of chromosomal-arm amplifications, BBMF finds a small set of interpretable bicliques linking patient subsets to recurrently co-altered chromosomal arms, providing a compact, biologically meaningful summary of tumor heterogeneity and demonstrating BBMF's utility for uncovering discrete latent structure in complex binary data.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Missing Knowledge Layer in Cognitive Architectures for AI Agents

arXiv:2604.11364v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The two most influential cognitive architecture frameworks for AI agents, CoALA [21] and JEPA [12], both lack an explicit Knowledge layer with its own persistence semantics. This gap produces a category error: systems apply cognitive decay to factual claims, or treat facts and experiences with identical update mechanics. We survey persistence semantics across existing memory systems and identify eight convergence points, from Karpathy's LLM Knowledge Base [10] to the BEAM benchmark's near-zero contradiction-resolution scores [22], all pointing to related architectural gaps. We propose a four-layer decom position (Knowledge, Memory, Wisdom, Intelligence) where each layer has fundamentally different persistence semantics: indefinite supersession, Ebbinghaus decay, evidence-gated revision, and ephemeral inference respectively. Companion implementations in Python and Rust demonstrate the architectural separation is feasible. We borrow terminology from cognitive science as a useful analogy (the Knowledge/Memory distinction echoes Tulving's trichotomy), but our layers are engineering constructs justified by persistence-semantics requirements, not by neural architecture. We argue that these distinctions demand distinct persistence semantics in engineering implementations, and that no current framework or system provides this.

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

A Quantitative Experimental Repeated Measures Study of Training Dynamics in a Small Llama Style Language Model Under a Compute-Aware Token Budget

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13370v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study examines training dynamics in a small Llama-style language model trained under a fixed, compute-constrained token budget. Rather than evaluating efficiency solely through endpoint performance, the study uses a quantitative experimental repeated measures design to analyze how validation loss, validation perplexity, rolling volatility, backslide behavior, spike behavior, and between-seed variability change across token-based training intervals. Six independent training runs were conducted on a 4.26-million-parameter model using the TinyStories corpus, CPU-based full-precision training, and a target budget of approximately 20 million cumulative training tokens. Metrics were collected across 21 intervals, producing 126 seed-by-interval observations. Repeated measures ANOVA showed statistically significant interval effects for validation loss, validation perplexity, and rolling volatility. Descriptive trajectories revealed rapid early improvement followed by non-monotonic degradation during later training intervals. Mean validation loss decreased from 8.3552 at initialization to 2.7996 near 4 million tokens, but increased to 3.9010 by the final checkpoint. Validation perplexity followed the same pattern, falling sharply early in training before rising later. Derived telemetry further showed recurrent validation-loss backslides and no interval-summary evidence of a stable phase under the predefined criteria. These findings suggest that compute-aware language model evaluation should examine training trajectories rather than endpoint metrics alone. In constrained compute settings, additional token exposure may increase computational cost without producing proportional generalization gains, and interval-level telemetry can reveal instability, regression, and diminishing returns that final metrics may obscure.

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

FragFuse: Bypassing Access Control of Large Language Model Agents via Memory-Based Query Fragmentation and Fusion

arXiv:2606.15609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on long-term memory to support complex task execution, user personalization, and domain adaptation. Meanwhile, emerging access-control mechanisms for LLM agents are being explored to block policy-violating requests and prevent misuse. We reveal a novel attack surface arising from agent memory operations: prohibited content that would trigger access control can be fragmented across interactions, stored in long-term memory in benign-appearing form, and later reconstructed through memory retrieval without appearing explicitly in the final user query. We propose FragFuse, the first attack that enables unprivileged users to bypass agent access control by exploiting this temporal channel introduced by long-term memory. FragFuse operates in three stages: (1) identifying rejection-responsive fragments via black-box adaptive querying with fragment masking; (2) injecting these fragments into memory using marker carrier queries; and (3) retrieving and fusing the stored fragments through a follow-up attack query. Although FragFuse can be instantiated manually for individual agents, we further develop a surrogate-based optimization scheme that tunes fusion instructions and marker designs, enabling automated attack generation without violating the attacker's threat-model assumptions. We evaluate FragFuse across four representative agent settings and task domains, covering three state-of-the-art agent access-control mechanisms. FragFuse achieves an average bypass success rate of 86.3% and an average end-to-end harmful task success rate of 41.1% across all settings, with only 4.4% average task-success degradation compared with configurations without access control. We also show that alternative defenses, including state-of-the-art prompt-injection detectors and perplexity detectors, do not effectively address this attack.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MET-Bench: Multimodal Entity Tracking for Evaluating the Limitations of Vision-Language and Reasoning Models

Entity state tracking is a necessary component of world modeling that requires maintaining coherent representations of entities over time. Previous work has benchmarked entity tracking performance in purely text-based tasks. We introduce MET-Bench, a multimodal entity tracking benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of vision-language models to track entity states across modalities. Using three domains, we assess how effectively current models integrate textual and image-based state updates. Our findings reveal a significant performance gap between text-based and image-based entity tracking. We empirically show this discrepancy primarily stems from deficits in visual reasoning rather than perception. We further show that explicit text-based reasoning strategies improve performance, yet limitations remain, especially in long-horizon multimodal tasks. We apply reinforcement learning to improve entity tracking in open-source VLMs. This yields substantial in-modality gains, but does not transfer robustly across input modalities. Our results highlight the need for improved multimodal representations and reasoning techniques to bridge the gap between textual and visual entity tracking.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Nocturnal Respiratory Rate and Variability Predict Long-term Mortality in Stable Outpatients with Cardiovascular Disease

Background: Respiratory rate (RR) predicts short-term mortality in acute care settings, yet its prognostic significance in clinically stable outpatients remains poorly defined. Objectives: To determine whether the median and variability of nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR) are independently associated with long-term cardiovascular and all-cause mortality in outpatients with cardiovascular disease. Methods: We analyzed overnight chest belt waveforms from elective polysomnography in 5,679 older adults with cardiovascular disease enrolled in the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS). NRR was quantified at 30-second resolution, and per-subject median NRR and within-night variability (standard deviation) were derived. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional hazards models were used to evaluate associations with cardiovascular and all-cause mortality over 3-year and 15-year follow-up periods, adjusting for demographic characteristics, cardiopulmonary comorbidities, and sleep apnea severity. Results: Higher median NRR and greater NRR variability were each associated with increased cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. Combining these metrics identified a high-risk group characterized by elevated median and high variability of NRR, with approximately five-fold higher 3-year all-cause mortality compared with a low-risk group; this association remained significant in Cox models (unadjusted HR: 2.61; 95% CI: 1.65, 4.14; p

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Trading symmetry for Hilbert-space dimension in Bell-inequality violation

arXiv:2601.02893v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum information, asymmetry, i.e., the lack of symmetry, is a resource allowing one to accomplish certain tasks that are otherwise impossible. Similarly, in a Bell test using any given Bell inequality, the maximum violation achievable using quantum strategies respecting or disregarding a certain symmetry can be different. In this work, we focus on the symmetry involved in the exchange of parties and explore when we have to trade this symmetry for a lower-dimensional quantum strategy in achieving the maximal violation of given Bell inequalities. For the family of symmetric Collins-Gisin-Linden-Massar-Popescu inequalities, we provide evidence showing that there is no such trade-off. However, for several other Bell inequalities with a small number of dichotomic measurement settings, we show that symmetric quantum strategies in the minimal Hilbert space dimension can only lead to a suboptimal Bell violation. In other words, there exist symmetric Bell inequalities that can only be maximally violated by asymmetric quantum strategies of minimal dimension. In contrast, one can also find examples of asymmetric Bell inequalities that are maximally violated by symmetric correlations. The implications of these findings on the geometry of the set of quantum correlations and the possibility of performing self-testing therefrom are briefly discussed.

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

Experimental Analysis of Neural Network-Based Image Classification on the CIFAR-10 Dataset

An experimental investigation of neural image classification on the CIFAR-10 benchmark is presented through fully connected and convolutional network formulations. The analysis emphasizes the complete learning pipeline: image vectorization, normalization, one-hot class encoding, supervised loss minimization, learning-rate selection, mini-batch training, convolutional feature extraction, max-pooling, and validation-based generalization assessment. A convolutional architecture with six convolutional layers and three max-pooling stages is evaluated for ten training epochs using a batch size of 128 and an Adam optimizer with a learning rate of 0.001. The validation accuracy reaches approximately 74.77%, while the validation loss begins to increase after the middle of training despite continued reduction in training loss. The resulting behavior illustrates the practical difference between representation learning and memorization, and it provides a compact experimental baseline for future studies on regularization, data augmentation, deeper architectures, and reproducible image-classification education.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

From Period Finding to Lattice Sampling: Experimental Insights into Shor's and Regev's Factoring Algorithms

arXiv:2606.17647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum algorithms for integer factorization represent one of the most prominent applications of quantum computation, with far-reaching implications for modern cryptography. While Shor's algorithm provides a polynomial-time solution in the ideal quantum model, its practical implementation is severely constrained by the limitations of current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. These constraints have motivated the exploration of alternative factoring algorithms with different structural and resource trade-offs. In this work, we present an experimental study of Regev's quantum factoring algorithm, implemented on real quantum hardware, and compare its behavior with that of Shor's algorithm under analogous conditions. Focusing on the case N = 15, we execute both algorithms on the QMIO quantum computer at the Centro de Supercomputacion de Galicia (CESGA) and contrast the results with one of IBM's open-access quantum computers and ideal simulations. This parallel execution enables a low-level comparison of the two algorithms, highlighting how their respective quantum implementations interact with hardware noise, limited circuit depth, and finite sampling. Our analysis emphasizes the different ways in which Shor's and Regev's algorithms encode arithmetic structure into quantum states through Fourier sampling in one and higher dimensions, respectively, and how these differences manifest in experimental outcomes. Although neither algorithm demonstrates a practical advantage in the small N regime, the results provide insight into their relative robustness and failure modes on contemporary quantum devices. This study illustrates the value of experimental benchmarking of alternative quantum factoring algorithms as a means of understanding the practical implications of algorithmic design choices in the NISQ era.

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

Non-Gaussian Phase Transition and Cascade of Instabilities in the Dissipative Quantum Rabi Model

arXiv:2507.07092v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The open quantum Rabi model describes a two-level system coupled to a harmonic oscillator. A Gaussian phase transition for the nonequilibrium steady states has been predicted when the bosonic mode is soft and subject to damping. We show that oscillator dephasing is a relevant perturbation, which leads to a non-Gaussian phase transition and an intriguing cascade of instabilities for $k$-th order bosonic operators, as well as a jump in the steady-state qubit polarization. For the soft-mode limit, the equations of motion form a closed hierarchy and spectral properties can be efficiently studied. To this purpose, we establish a fruitful connection to non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. The results for the phase diagram, stability boundaries, and relevant observables are based on mean-field analysis, exact diagonalization, perturbation theory, and Keldysh field theory.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Communication Policy Evolution for Proactive LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.14314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents have rapidly evolved into autonomous systems, yet a persistent information gap remains between users and agents: communication is costly, while users' identical preferences further limit information exchange. To investigate how agents should communicate across modalities, this paper formalizes Communication Policy, establishes textual and UI-based policies, and then evaluates communication policies across diverse environments, personas, and model combinations. Building information asymmetry for proactive agents, we set up two complementary settings, User-Agent and Planner-Executor. Experimental results reveal complementary strengths between interaction channels: text-based interaction often facilitates task performance, while structured UI improves agents' response quality and persona compliance. Motivated by that, a hybrid method combines these advantages. We further propose Communication Policy Evolution (CPE), a self-evolution framework for refining communication policies through rollout and prompt-level evolving. Without model modification, CPE achieves the best task success across multiple settings using prompt refinement alone. Our findings identify communication behavior as a critical yet underexplored design dimension for LLM agents.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

MGUP: A Momentum-Gradient Alignment Update Policy for Stochastic Optimization

arXiv:2606.17526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient optimization is essential for training large language models. Although intra-layer selective updates have been explored, a general mechanism that enables fine-grained control while ensuring convergence guarantees is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we propose MGUP, a novel mechanism for selective updates. MGUP augments standard momentum-based optimizers by applying larger step-sizes to a selected fixed proportion of parameters in each iteration, while applying smaller, non-zero step-sizes to the rest. As a nearly {plug-and-play} module, MGUP seamlessly integrates with optimizers such as AdamW, Lion, and Muon. This yields powerful variants such as MGUP-AdamW, MGUP-Lion, and MGUP-Muon. Under standard assumptions, we provide theoretical convergence guarantees for MGUP-AdamW (without weight decay) in stochastic optimization. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks, including MAE pretraining, LLM pretraining, and downstream fine-tuning, demonstrate that our MGUP-enhanced optimizers achieve superior or more stable performance compared to their original base optimizers. We offer a principled, versatile, and theoretically grounded strategy for efficient intra-layer selective updates, accelerating and stabilizing the training of large-scale models. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/MaeChd/MGUP.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ReSET: Accurate Latency-Critical NVFP4 Reasoning via Step-Aware Temperature Scaling

arXiv:2606.13233v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) improve complex problem-solving by generating long intermediate reasoning traces, but this substantially increases inference costs. NVFP4 inference offers a promising approach to reduce both computational and memory costs through hardware-supported low-precision execution. However, directly applying NVFP4 to LRMs introduces two practical limitations: reasoning accuracy degrades under quantization, and existing NVFP4 kernels do not fully realize latency benefits in small-batch autoregressive decoding. In this work, we analyze the effect of NVFP4 quantization on token-level uncertainty during reasoning. We show that quantization increases incorrect sampling at low-entropy symbolic tokens, while causing over-concentration on a small set of tokens in high-uncertainty reasoning steps. Based on this observation, we propose ReSET, a reasoning-step entropy-based temperature-scaling method that estimates step-level uncertainty online and adapts the decoding temperature using both token-level and step-level entropy signals. To address the latency gap, we further design a CUDA-core small-$M$ NVFP4 kernel for latency-critical autoregressive decoding. Across reasoning benchmarks and model scales, ReSET improves NVFP4 reasoning accuracy by up to $\sim\!$2 points over the NVFP4 baseline. Our CUDA-core small-$M$ kernel further improves latency-critical decoding, delivering up to $2.5\!\times$ kernel-level speedup over NVFP4 vLLM and approximately $2\!\times$ end-to-end decoding speedup over BF16. Code is available at https://github.com/aiha-lab/ReSET.

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

Teaching Diffusion to Speculate Left-to-Right

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation. Speculative decoding addresses this bottleneck by employing a lightweight draft model to propose multiple future tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model. Recent work has demonstrated that diffusion language models are well suited for this setting, as they can generate entire blocks of draft tokens in parallel and thereby alleviate the sequential constraints of autoregressive drafting. A subtlety of this regime is that block-diffusion drafters generate tokens bidirectionally within a block, whereas verification is performed by an autoregressive target model that evaluates tokens in a strictly left-to-right manner, leaving a gap between the symmetric training-time objective and the asymmetric verification-time reward. In this work, we offer an empirical analysis of three training-time interventions that narrow this gap: token positional weighting, a first-error focal loss that targets the position that breaks the accepted prefix within each block, and a chain loss term that substitutes a differentiable surrogate for the expected accepted length. The three interventions act along orthogonal axes (position, block-conditional first error, joint prefix) and compose additively; they are likewise orthogonal to test-time alignment mechanisms such as multi-draft self-selection, with which they can in principle be combined. Across four target models and six reasoning, code, and dialogue benchmarks, the three interventions raise accepted draft length by 21-76% per benchmark over a position-uniform baseline, without adding additional forward passes and without changing the inference pipeline or the rejection-sampling exactness contract.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Sex-based Network-Specific Differences in Connectomes: A Krakencoder-Based Analysis

This study examines how deficiencies in one brain connectome modality propagate to the other, using the Krakencoder as a simulation framework. Structural and functional connectomes from 702 healthy participants in the Human Connectome Project were analyzed, with the impact of each of the Yeo-7 functional networks assessed separately. Seven scenarios were considered, each involving the removal of a single network while the remaining networks were preserved. The resulting perturbations in cross-modal predictions were quantified using three complementary metrics: KL divergence on eigenvalue spectra, Frobenius norm, and Wasserstein distance. In addition, the persistence of sex-specific information within the predicted connectomes was evaluated. Across all metrics and both prediction directions, the Default Mode Network produced the largest perturbations, whereas the Somatomotor network yielded the smallest. Sex differences in network-level perturbation signatures were subtle, with the best result being an accuracy of 66.09% from connectomes predicted under network-removal conditions. In contrast, connectomes predicted from intact inputs achieved substantially higher sex classification accuracy, reaching up to 84.76%. These findings confirm that full predicted connectomes retain considerably more sex-discriminative information than perturbation-derived signatures alone.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Comparative Study of Graph Neural Network Layer Selection for Interaction Modelling in Driving Trajectory Prediction

arXiv:2606.14956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous driving systems rely on precise trajectory prediction to plan safe and efficient movement. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a promising approach for modelling spatiotemporal interactions among road agents. However, designing GNN architectures for trajectory prediction remains non-standardized, with little guidance on which graph layers effectively capture spatial interactions and temporal dynamics. This paper offers a detailed comparative study of 19 graph layer types, focusing on their spatial and temporal processing capabilities to discover the most effective architectures for trajectory prediction. Within the explored hyperparameter setting, we highlight five standout layer combinations, with ARMA, Chebyshev, and topology-aware layers consistently performing better than others. Beyond performance metrics, our findings yield practical design principles: sum-based aggregation is more effective than mean-based methods, multi-head attention mechanisms enable richer interactions, and assigning different weights to different hop distances significantly improves prediction accuracy. These findings offer useful guidance for designing more interpretable and effective trajectory prediction models.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

RNAStabFormer: Region-Aware Multi-Task Hybrid Learning for RNA Stability Prediction from Pulse-Chase Transcriptomics

Authors:

RNA stability is a central layer of post-transcriptional gene regulation, yet large-scale stability labels derived from pulse-chase transcriptomics depend strongly on quantification region, time-window definition, and replicate quality control. We present RNAStabFormer, a controlled learning framework for predicting human RNA stability proxies from transcript sequence. Its core model, RAMHT, combines region-specific nucleotide Transformer encoders for CDS, and sequence, a CDS codon stream, engineered sequence-grammar features, gated fusion, and four task-specific regression heads. We construct four strict consensus labels from ENCODE BrU-seq/BruChase-seq data by crossing gene-sense and exon-sense quantification with late-chase 6 h/2 h and total-chase 6 h/0 h retention ratios, and evaluate all models on fixed repeated-random and chromosome-holdout splits. Across chromosome holdouts, XGBoost remains the strongest standalone model, with median Pearson correlations of 0.504, 0.544, 0.546, and 0.778 on the four labels. RAMHT is competitive with raw-sequence deep models but does not universally exceed engineered-feature baselines. A strict nested RAMHT–XGBoost blend nevertheless improves gene total-chase prediction by 0.017 mean Pearson and exon late-chase prediction by 0.004 mean Pearson over XGBoost. Region and mechanism analyses show that CDS, local k-mer composition, and codon-sensitive signals dominate predictive information. RNAStabFormer therefore provides both a multi-task neural model and a leakage-controlled evaluation protocol for RNA stability prediction from pulse-chase data.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

$\alpha$-fair heterogeneous agent reinforcement learning

arXiv:2606.13076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cooperation in multi-agent systems is typically optimized through utilitarian objectives that maximize overall efficiency but fail to account for reward distribution, often resulting in inequitable "leader-follower" dynamics. While fairness-based approaches encourage pro-social behaviors where every agent benefits from cooperation, many current algorithms - including those utilizing reward shaping - break the stationarity of Markov Games or lack rigorous theoretical guarantees. This creates a critical gap between fair objective methods and theoretically safe learning frameworks. We propose a novel framework that bridges $\alpha$-fairness with Heterogeneous-Agent Trust Region Learning (HATRL), ensuring monotonic improvement and convergence toward Nash Equilibria. Our approach leverages a fair advantage function that dynamically weights agent utilities based on their expected returns, allowing the global objective to transition from purely utilitarian efficiency to $\alpha$-fairness welfare based on the parameter $\alpha$. We introduce two practical algorithms, $\alpha$-fair HATRPO and $\alpha$-fair HAPPO, and demonstrate through experiments in sequential social dilemmas like CleanUp and CommonHarvest that they perform better than HATRL's algorithms from a utilitarian point of view while achieving socially higher outcomes.