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.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Navigating a crowded developing brain leaves neurons with broken DNA

As neurons migrate to their final destinations in the forming brain, their DNA gets damaged. The brain has evolved a fix, but there can be lasting consequences if repair fails. As neurons migrate to their final destinations in the forming brain, their DNA gets damaged. The brain has evolved a fix, but there can be lasting consequences if repair fails.

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

libhmm: A Modern C++20 Library for Hidden Markov Models with Correct MLE Emission M-Steps

Authors:

arXiv:2605.29208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We describe libhmm, a C++20 library for Hidden Markov Model parameter estimation, sequence decoding, and model selection. libhmm addresses two gaps in existing software: the absence of a well-maintained, zero-dependency C++ HMM library suitable for embedding in production systems, and the widespread use of method-of-moments (MOM) approximations in the emission distribution M-step of the Baum-Welch algorithm. The library implements correct maximum likelihood estimators for sixteen scalar emission distributions, including an ECME algorithm for the location-scale Student-t distribution, Newton-Raphson maximization for Gamma, Beta, Weibull, and Negative Binomial distributions, and the von Mises distribution for circular data. All forward-backward and Viterbi calculations operate in full log-space. SIMD acceleration is provided for AVX-512, AVX2, SSE2, and ARM NEON via compile-time dispatch with scalar fallback. Version 4 adds multivariate observation support via the BasicHmm template, with three multivariate emission families (diagonal Gaussian, full-covariance Gaussian, and independent components) each with correct weighted MLE M-steps. Python bindings are available via the companion package pylibhmm. We compare libhmm against established C and C++ HMM libraries and against published R reference packages on seven real-data benchmarks, and discuss the architectural tradeoffs made in the design.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Evaluation of Image Matching for Art Skills Assessment

While some individuals possess a natural talent for drawing, mastering this skill requires dedicated training and practice. Determining one's skill in the art of drawing requires proper comprehensive assessment. In this paper, we propose a method to measure drawing skill by by matching the hand-drawn image with the original template. Existing techniques often involve complex processes. However, advancements in computer vision allow us to train computers to perform these comparisons at a human-like level, thereby resolving the tedious and overwhelming traditional process. Using computer vision applications, determining image similarity involves identifying the level of similarities in an image with a reference image. We have implemented and analyzed the SIFT feature and Siamese network to measure image similarity. Our results indicate that it is feasible to assess art skill levels. Through feature analysis, we found that SIFT-based key point matching provides a more effective means of detecting drawing skills.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Towards the Virtual Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Patient: Inferring Cortical Excitability through Whole-Brain Dynamical Modeling

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is increasingly recognized as a multisystem neurodegenerative disorder in which motor-neuron degeneration is accompanied by widespread alterations in cortical dynamics. Among its most reproducible neurophysiological signatures is cortical hyperexcitability, yet how this local excitability imbalance shapes distributed whole-brain activity remains poorly understood. Here, we combined source-reconstructed resting-state MEG data, tractography-informed whole-brain modeling, and simulation-based inference to investigate whether ALS-related alterations in large-scale brain dynamics can be mechanistically explained by changes in cortical excitability. First, we characterized empirical brain dynamics using complementary features spanning regional activity amplitude and variability, functional connectivity, and avalanche-based metrics. These analyses revealed significant alterations in ALS patients relative to healthy controls, as well as associations with clinical impairment and disease staging. To mechanistically interpret these changes, we employed a reduced Wong-Wang whole-brain model in which local recurrent excitation modulates emergent large-scale neural dynamics. Simulations showed that increasing excitability systematically reproduced the empirical dynamical signatures observed in ALS. We then applied a simulation-based inference framework to estimate latent excitability parameters directly from empirical observations. Whole-brain model inversion revealed increased excitability in ALS patients compared with controls. The recovered excitability parameter was associated with disease staging, supporting its clinical relevance as a model-derived descriptor of ALS progression. Finally, by extending the model to estimate frontal and non-frontal excitability separately, we found that ALS-related alterations were predominantly associated with increased frontal excitability, whereas non-frontal regions appeared comparatively less affected. The recovered parameters related to disease staging. Together, these findings provide a mechanistic framework linking altered large-scale brain dynamics in ALS to selective cortical hyperexcitability, explaining how local excitability changes can give rise to global network reorganization. More broadly, they show how computational model inversion can recover latent multiscale pathophysiological processes from empirical neural recordings, offering a non-perturbative alternative to complex experimental paradigms typically required to causally probe local-to-global mechanisms.

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

Improving Code-Switching ASR with Code-Mixing Guided Synthetic Speech

arXiv:2606.19381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Code-switch (CS) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) remains challenging due to limited availability of high quality CS text-speech pairs for training. Although synthetic data augmentation via Text-to-speech (TTS) has been explored, existing CS TTS approaches primarily optimise reconstruction fidelity and do not explicitly enforce language-boundary consistency, thereby limiting their effectiveness for CS ASR augmentation. This paper proposes a code-mixing guided preference-learning framework that steers synthetic speech generation toward improved code-switching fidelity using the Code Mixing Index (CMI). Experiments on the SEAME Mandarin-English conversational corpus demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the utility of synthetic data for ASR fine-tuning. Specifically, when fine-tuning Whisper Large, the proposed approach reduces Mixed Error Rate (MER) from 12.1%/17.8% to 8.9%/14.2% on the DevMAN and DevSGE sets, respectively.

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

MVOFormer: Flow-Semantic Transformer for Robust Monocular Visual Odometry

Monocular visual odometry (MVO) is foundational to autonomous navigation and robotic localization. However, existing learning-based MVO approaches often struggle with either a lack of interpretable, complementary features or overly complex multi-stage architectures. These limitations inherently restrict their robustness and cross-domain generalization. In this work, we propose MVOFormer, a novel transformer framework for robust monocular visual odometry. Our architecture features a Flow-Semantic Dual Branch Encoder that synergizes dense geometric motion cues with object-centric semantic priors, explicitly distinguishing static structures from dynamic distractors. These representations are then fused by an Iterative Multimodal Decoder, enabling coarse-to-fine pose refinement while dynamically suppressing attention on unreliable regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that, without any target-domain fine-tuning, MVOFormer achieves superior zero-shot generalization and robustness, significantly outperforming prior learning-based frame-to-frame methods across diverse benchmarks including TartanAir, KITTI, TUM-RGBD, and ETH3D-SLAM.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Plasma protein prioritisation in rheumatoid arthritis reveals druggable targets and shared biology with cardiovascular diseases

Abstract Background Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune inflammatory disease with complex and incompletely understood molecular mechanisms. Understanding circulating proteins associated with RA may improve understanding of disease biology and clarify its pathological links with cardiometabolic comorbidities. Methods A proteome-wide two-sample Mendelian randomisation (MR) drug target analysis was conducted using plasma proteins measured in 54,219 participants from the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project as exposures and RA and cardiometabolic diseases as the outcomes. Summary statistics for RA included 53,663 cases and 1,070,200 controls. Colocalisation analysis was performed to confirm shared single causal variants and prioritise RA proteins supported by both MR and colocalisation. The prioritised proteins were then evaluated in the Accelerating Medicines Partnership RA Phase II synovial single-cell dataset for cell-type expression patterns. Druggability was then assessed followed by analysis of genetic overlap between RA-associated proteins and cardiometabolic diseases. Results 37 plasma proteins had a causal effect on RA risk, supported by combined evidence from MR and conditional colocalisation. In synovial tissue, TPPP3, RARRES2, AKAP12, and GGT5 were predominantly expressed in stromal and endothelial cell clusters. Druggability assessment identified IFNGR2, IL6R, CD40, and FCGR2B as Tier 1 targets. However, several biologically relevant proteins, including RARRES2, AKAP12, TPPP3, and SNX2, had limited available druggability data. Genetic overlap analysis demonstrated shared protein signals between RA and cardiovascular diseases, including overlap of RARRES2 and TPPP3 with coronary artery disease (CAD) and FCGR2B with atrial fibrillation (AF). To approximate the therapeutic effect of target inhibition, the direction of effect estimates for proteins showing overlap between RA-CAD and RA-AF was reversed. Conclusion This study identified circulating proteins involved in RA pathogenesis and reveals shared mechanisms between RA and cardiovascular diseases. While some proteins showed clear translational potential targets, several prioritised proteins had limited available druggability information and could not be confidently classified. Addressing these gaps may help identify new targets relevant to RA management. Future work should also use phenome-wide MR studies to evaluate potential on-target adverse effects of protein inhibition across RA-CAD and RA-AF.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Light slows down carbon nanotubes in water

Water-suspended carbon nanotubes move more slowly in green light, suggesting that excited electrons in the tubes couple to the water through ‘quantum friction’. Water-suspended carbon nanotubes move more slowly in green light, suggesting that excited electrons in the tubes couple to the water through ‘quantum friction’.

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

GRACE: Step-Level Benchmark for Faithful Reasoning over Context

Many reasoning tasks require models to reason over input context, from document-grounded question answering to rule-based deduction. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting produces traces that appear transparent, yet individual steps can silently deviate from the source evidence, even when the final answer is correct. Existing methods detect hallucinations at the response level but fail to identify where in the chain a failure occurs or what type it is. We introduce GRACE, the first human-annotated step-level faithfulness benchmark with a data-driven error taxonomy for context-grounded textual reasoning. GRACE covers CoT traces from 10 models across 4 source datasets, with each step annotated for faithfulness, error category, and natural language explanation. A data-driven taxonomy, discovered bottom-up via unsupervised clustering, organizes failures into two tracks: GRACE-Inference (deductive errors) and GRACE-Grounding (factual grounding errors), with four categories each. The evaluation set is human-annotated and challenging by design. Our experiments reveal substantial headroom for current models. In addition, integrating step-level faithfulness signals into reinforcement learning pipelines improves both downstream accuracy and reasoning reliability.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

RUB: Evaluating Residual Knowledge in Unlearned Models

Machine Unlearning (MUL) has emerged as a key mechanism for privacy protection and content regulation, yet current techniques often fail to guarantee the complete removal of sensitive information. While most existing works focus on verifying the execution of unlearning, they overlook the critical question of whether models remain robust against adversarial attempts to recover forgotten knowledge. In this work, we advocate for the principle of Robust Unlearning, which requires models to be both indistinguishable from retrained counterparts and resilient against diverse adversarial threats. To instantiate this principle, we propose a unified benchmark, RUB (Robust Unlearning Benchmark), that systematically evaluates the robustness of unlearning algorithms across classification, image-to-image reconstruction, and text-to-image synthesis. Within this framework, we introduce the Unlearning Mapping Attack (UMA) as a generalizable method to detect residual information, and demonstrate how existing attack strategies can be adapted into this framework as long as they conform to the generic UMA framework. Our experiments across discriminative and generative tasks reveal that state-of-the-art unlearning methods remain vulnerable under these evaluations, even when passing standard verification metrics. By positioning robustness as the central criterion and providing a benchmark for adversarial evaluation, we hope RUB paves the way toward more reliable and secure unlearning practices. The codebase and model checkpoints in RUB will be published.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

When and How Severely: Scenario-Specific Safety Envelopes for Driving VLAs

arXiv:2606.14238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety certification of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) driving planners under ISO 21448 (SOTIF) rests on an Operational Design Domain (ODD) specification that answers two complementary questions: when does the planner start to fail, and how severely does it fail once it does? We evaluate Alpamayo R1, a 10B-parameter open-weight driving VLA, on 15,968 (clip, attack) pairs. We find a conservative-aggregate gap: an aggregate safe threshold of $\sigma \leq 50$ under a 15% average displacement error (ADE) budget masks well-sampled scenarios that tolerate the top of the tested grid ($\sigma = 70$). A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) on the changed-explanation subset identifies six discrete severity bands (BIC-optimal $k{=}6$), so two perturbation conditions with the same mean error can differ materially in their share of high-severity (C4/C5) failures. Joining the two analyses on the same corpus surfaces a finding neither yields in isolation: the scenarios with the loosest noise thresholds are not those with the lowest high-severity rate: STOP_SIGNAL concentrates roughly $4\times$ the C4/C5 share of LANE_KEEPING despite tolerating a larger $\sigma$. A deployable SOTIF ODD specification for driving VLAs therefore requires a two-dimensional safety envelope, not a single aggregate value per hazard.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Optimizing Appliance Scheduling for Solar Energy Management Using Metaheuristic Algorithms

arXiv:2606.13407v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Renewable energy is essential for meeting future energy demands; however, solar energy generation, which occurs only during daylight hours often does not align with household consumption patterns. Appliances such as cookers, washing machines, and dryers are typically operated according to user preferred schedules rather than solar energy availability, creating a scheduling optimization problem. The objective is to determine optimal appliance start times to maximize renewable energy utilization while minimizing user inconvenience and adhering to system constraints. This paper presents a metaheuristic approach using Iterated Local Search (ILS) and Simulated Annealing (SA) to optimize appliance start times, while considering appliance operating durations, power consumption, inverter limit, battery state of charge constraints, and solar generation forecasts. Unlike most existing work, the scheduling is extended beyond a single day to accommodate unfinished tasks from previous days (spillover), ensuring operational continuity and enabling sequential operation across multiple days. Experimental results show that the sequential multi-day scheduling framework effectively manages system constraints while ensuring user convenience under exclusive solar generation. These findings also open opportunities for future research on multi-objective trade-offs between investment in equipment of various sizes, return on that investment, and user satisfaction.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Information Gap and Feasibility-Aware Inference in Binomial Logistic Mixtures

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

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

Learn-to-learn on Arbitrary Textual Conditioning: A Hypernetwork-Driven Meta-Gated LLM

Conventional LLMs may suffer from corpus heterogeneity and subtle condition changes. While finetuning can create the catastrophe forgetting issue, application of meta-learning on LLMs is also limited due to its complexity and scalability. In this paper, we activate the meta-signal of $\beta$ within the SwiGLU blocks, resulting in a meta-gating mechanism that adaptively adjusts the nonlinearity of FFN. A hypernetwork is employed which dynamically produces $\beta$ on textual conditions, providing meta-controllability on LLMs. By testing on different condition types such as task, domain, persona, and style, our method outperforms finetuning and meta-learning baselines, and can generalize reasonably on unseen tasks, condition types, or instructions. Our code can be found in https://github.com/AaronJi/MeGan.

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

Simulation-Based Multi-Fillet Evaluation of Woody Breast Poultry Fillets

Woody breast (WB) is a myopathy in modern broiler chickens that causes the breast muscle to become unusually stiff and fibrous, leading to decreased meat quality and significant economic losses. State-of-the-art automated WB detection relies on a side-view imaging system to analyze the bending behavior of a single fillet as it falls off a conveyor belt. While highly accurate, this approach is constrained by its single-fillet field of view, creating throughput bottlenecks on commercial processing lines. In this paper, we address this limitation via a novel multi-fillet detection architecture utilizing a top-down camera configuration. To validate our approach, we first develop a high-fidelity digital twin of an industrial conveyor system. Next, we synthesize a diverse dataset of 3D fillet meshes and model their viscoelastic bending dynamics using a physics-based simulation engine. Lastly, a continuous 2D shape deformation score is extracted from the top-down perspective as the simulated fillets traverse the roller precipice. Experimental results demonstrate that the top-down shape score effectively captures the contour changes of the fillets as it bends, providing a robust and scalable alternative to a side-view imaging system for simultaneous multi-fillet WB evaluation.

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

Quantifying the Impact of Lossy Compression on Neural Generative Surrogate Modeling

arXiv:2606.15959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural networks are used as generative surrogate models for scientific discovery, which are trainable approximations of scientific simulations. These models enable users to replace time-consuming numerical simulations with learned alternatives, providing quick solutions. However, high-fidelity generative surrogate models require massive training datasets, which can create storage and I/O challenges. Lossy compression is a promising way to reduce this burden, but compression errors may affect the model quality in subtle ways, making it challenging to quantify their impact. In this work, we examine how lossy compression of training data impacts the quality of generative surrogate models. We begin by characterizing the uncertainty inherent in training neural networks, showing that identical training configurations can produce different models. By exploiting this variability, we propose a method to estimate how much compression-induced error a surrogate model can tolerate without affecting its accuracy. Evaluation of two application simulations demonstrates that our approach significantly reduces memory/storage requirements and speeds up training while producing high-quality surrogate models. These results show that lossy compression saves data storage up to 23.7x and 39x with negligible impact on the quality of the surrogate model. Meanwhile, reducing the size of the training data set also enhances the data loading speed and reduces the training time by up to 3x.

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

We Need Explanation Cards to Connect Explanation Algorithms to the Real World

arXiv:2606.16786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Algorithmic explanations are intended to help stakeholders understand opaque algorithmic decisions, but in practice, they often fall short. First, the meaning of algorithmic explanations is often not what one might intuitively expect, so expert knowledge is required to interpret them correctly. Second, recent work has shown that popular explanation algorithms are uninformative about the behavior of complex decision functions. Together, these issues create a gap between what explanations appear to convey and what they actually provide. In this work, we propose Explanation Cards for Explanation Algorithms, which augment standard explanations with complementary information about robustness and validity, as well as clear instructions for interpretation. The complementary information can render otherwise uninformative explanations practically useful, while also helping to detect cases where they are not. Importantly, the interpretation instructions in explanation cards shift responsibility from users to providers: Rather than expecting users to recognize what can and cannot be concluded from an explanation, providers must make this explicit upfront. Using counterfactual explanations and SHAP as examples, we demonstrate how providers can construct explanation cards and that these cards provide users with the guidance needed for sound interpretation. We further argue that explanation cards offer a practical means of operationalising the explainability provisions of the EU AI Act. Overall, explanation cards are a significant step toward making explanation algorithms fit for real-world use cases.

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

MMDiff: Extending Diffusion Transformers for Multi-Modal Generation

Diffusion transformers have demonstrated remarkable generative capabilities, yet the rich perceptual representations computed across their denoising trajectory are discarded once the content is rendered. We present MMDiff, a framework that transforms a frozen diffusion transformer into a multi-modal generative system that jointly produces images alongside any combination of dense perceptual modalities using lightweight decoder heads. Our central finding is that perceptual information is temporally distributed along the denoising trajectory, and that multi-timestep feature fusion with spatially varying aggregation weights is essential, improving semantic segmentation results by up to 28.7% mIoU over single-timestep extraction. We further adopt concept-driven attention extraction for interpretable spatial guidance, and show that frozen diffusion features are competitive with and complementary to state-of-the-art encoders such as DINOv3. By training only lightweight decoder heads on a frozen backbone, we achieve strong performance in semantic segmentation, salient object detection, and depth estimation, and demonstrate that this framework enables effective synthetic data generation at scale.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Low-Energy Reduced RISC-V Instruction Subset Processor for Tsetlin Machine Inference at the Edge

arXiv:2606.19964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tsetlin Machine (TM) is a logic-based machine learning approach that relies on simple bitwise operations and finite-state automata, which makes it attractive for edge AI deployments. Recent work has focused on co-processor and accelerator designs based on Tsetlin Machines (TMs). Although these designs achieve high performance, they typically depend on tightly coupled interfaces, microcode-style programming, and external host processors, limiting flexibility and ease of programming. In this work, we present a domain-specific RISC-V microprocessor architecture and design flow tailored for TM inference. Leveraging the modular structure of RISC-V, we design a reduced instruction subset processor that retains programmability while targeting improved performance and lower energy consumption for TM workloads. Instruction profiling is employed to guide instruction reduction, followed by datapath and control path simplifications tailored to TM inference. Both the baseline RV32IM core and the proposed reduced core are evaluated across multiple datasets and compared with Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs), which serve as a hardware-efficient baseline due to their reliance on bitwise operations during inference. Results show that TM achieves comparable or higher accuracy (e.g., up to 88.18% on CIFAR-2 compared to 60.0% for BNN) while reducing execution time by up to 98% across multiple datasets. Furthermore, the proposed design achieves an average $29.7\times$ reduction in energy consumption, demonstrating its effectiveness for programmable and efficient edge AI systems.

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

Exploring Extrinsic and Intrinsic Properties for Effective Reasoning with Code Interpreter

Reasoning with a Code Interpreter (CI) has emerged as an effective paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through executable computation and iterative verification. Despite its growing adoption, the behavioral properties underlying effective code reasoning remain largely underexplored. In this work, we investigate code reasoning from two distinct perspectives inspired by prior studies of natural language reasoning: extrinsic properties, represented by crucial tokens, and intrinsic properties, represented by code-specific cognitive behaviors. Across multiple LLMs, we find that stronger CI reasoning models consistently exhibit a higher prevalence of crucial tokens and cognitive behaviors, particularly verification, backtracking, and backward chaining. Building on these observations, we examine how these properties can be leveraged during both inference and training. At inference time, appending code-specific crucial tokens improves performance on several reasoning capabilities, including mathematical, ordering, and optimization, while yielding limited benefits elsewhere. At training time, augmenting a state-of-the-art framework with code-specific cognitive behaviors improves supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning performance in two of three evaluated models. Further analysis shows that these behaviors reduce overthinking in incorrect responses and improve token efficiency, while also revealing factors that limit gains in a certain model. Our findings provide the first systematic characterization of effective reasoning with CI and demonstrate both the potential and limitations of leveraging key properties to improve CI-based reasoning.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Getting Better at Working With You: Compiling User Corrections into Runtime Enforcement for Coding Agents

Interactive LLM agents are becoming part of daily work, but they do not reliably become easier to work with over time: a correction remembered in one session may still be violated in the next. We study this gap between preference access and preference compliance. In tasks derived from anonymized real-user friction cases, Mem0 memory still leaves 57.5% of applicable preference checks violated. We introduce Test-time Rule Acquisition and Compiled Enforcement (TRACE), a drop-in skill-layer pipeline for coding-agent runtimes that mines user corrections, rewrites them as atomic rules, and compiles them into runtime checks that must pass before an agent completes future tasks. Unlike runtime checks written ahead of time by developers, TRACE skills come from the user's own chat corrections. We evaluate TRACE with simulated user-in-the-loop experiments on ClawArena coding-agent tasks and MemoryArena-derived memory-intensive tasks. On ClawArena, TRACE reduces held-out preference violation from 100.0% to 37.6% on in-distribution tasks and from 100.0% to 2.0% on out-of-distribution tasks. On MemoryArena-derived tasks, TRACE reduces in-distribution violation from 100.0% to 60.5% while matching or exceeding the strongest memory baseline on task pass. These results suggest that compiling corrections into runtime enforcement can address a repeated-friction failure mode that memory alone does not reliably solve, reducing the need for users to restate the same correction across future sessions. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/TRACE_exp, and the deployable skill is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/tellonce.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

AMaNITA: an end-to-end workflow for native tRNA nanopore sequencing data analysis

Transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules serve as essential adapters during protein translation. While direct RNA sequencing (DRS) via Oxford Nanopore Technologies has emerged as a powerful platform for systematic tRNAome profiling, we currently lack a simple and robust statistical framework for nanopore tRNA data analyses. Here, we address this gap by developing AMaNITA (Abundance, Modifications, and Nanopore Intensity Toolbox Application), an end-to-end bioinformatic workflow that enables simplified, robust, and scalable analyses of nanopore native tRNA sequencing datasets. AMaNITA streamlines the entire analytical trajectory: from upstream processing (basecalling, mapping, filtering, batch effect correction) to downstream assessment of differential tRNA abundance and modification stoichiometry. The workflow generates an interactive HTML report for data exploration and analysis, allowing the user to download the source data files and resulting plots. AMaNITA can be executed using Singularity from the command line, without requiring installation of dependencies.

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

Recursively Trained Diffusion Models: Limiting Collapse Distribution and Spectral Characterization

arXiv:2606.13796v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recursive training of generative models on their own outputs can lead to model collapse, a compounding drift away from the true data distribution. Existing theoretical works bound finite-round error accumulation in the context of diffusion models, but two questions remain open:~what distribution does the recursion converge to, and how fast? We answer both, isolating a mechanism distinct from imperfect learning: even with perfect score estimation and exact sampling, the early stopping of the reverse diffusion (required for numerical stability) drives a progressive drift away from the data distribution. We prove that this recursion converges geometrically to a unique limiting distribution, which admits a closed-form characterization as an infinite mixture of increasingly Gaussian-smoothed versions of the data distribution. A Hermite spectral decomposition of this limit reveals that recursive training acts as a low-pass filter: higher-order modes, which encode fine non-Gaussian structure, are attenuated much more strongly than coarse modes. This spectral picture motivates annealed truncation schedules that progressively shrink truncation times across retraining rounds; we prove that any schedule converging to $0$ asymptotically eliminates recursive compounding. Finally, we show our idealized characterization is robust: in the presence of discretization and score estimation errors, the learned distribution remains in a Wasserstein-2 ball around the ideal limit, with mode-dependent contraction rates that contract high-order errors faster than low-order ones. We validate the theory on synthetic Gaussian mixtures and CIFAR-10.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Evolving Agents in the Dark: Retrospective Harness Optimization via Self-Preference

AI agents rely on a harness of skills, tools, and workflows to solve complex problems. Continually improving this harness is essential for adapting to new tasks. However, existing optimization methods typically require ground-truth validation sets, yet such labeled data is difficult to acquire in practical deployment settings. To address this problem, we introduce Retrospective Harness Optimization (RHO), a self-supervised method that optimizes the agent harness using only past trajectories. Specifically, RHO selects a diverse coreset of challenging tasks from past trajectories and re-solves them in parallel. The agent analyzes these rollouts using self-validation and self-consistency, then generates candidate harness updates and selects the most effective one by its own pairwise self-preference. We evaluate RHO across three diverse domains, spanning software engineering, technical work, and knowledge work. Notably, a single optimization round improves the pass rate on SWE-Bench Pro from 59% to 78% without any external grading. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that RHO effectively targets prior failure modes. As a result, the optimized harness alters the agent's behavior patterns and sustains higher accuracy during long-horizon sessions.