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 (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human Universal Grasping

arXiv:2606.17054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans can grasp objects effortlessly, whereas multi-fingered robots are far from this level of generality. We argue that the most natural source of robot grasping data is from humans, who pick up thousands of objects every day. We present HUG, a flow-matching model that generates diverse human grasps for any user-specified object in a single RGB-D image captured from a stereo camera. Using smart glasses, we first collect 1M-HUGs, an egocentric dataset of human grasps spanning 1M frames (27.8 hrs) and 6,707 object instances across 41 buildings. Next, to model the distribution of natural human grasps, our novel flow-matching model fuses RGB and depth observations to output a grasp parameterized by wrist translation, wrist rotation, and MANO hand pose. Predicted grasps can be retargeted to various robot hands, enabling zero-shot grasping in everyday scenes. To standardize evaluation, we build a new simulated benchmark, HUG-Bench, of 90 unseen objects from five geometric categories and various sizes, with metric-scale 3D meshes. We evaluate HUG in the real world on the 30-object test set of HUG-Bench across multiple stereo cameras, robot embodiments, and household environments. HUG outperforms the state-of-the-art grasping baselines by +23% and +34% on our challenging object set. Code, data, benchmark, checkpoints, and an interactive demo are released on our website: https://grasping.io/

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

TRON: Tracing Rays to Orchestrate a Neural Renderer for 3D Gaussian Reconstructions

We introduce TRON, a rendering framework that combines 3D Gaussian ray tracing with neural rendering to enable realistic and controllable rendering of real-world 3D scenes under novel lighting, dynamic object motion, object insertion, and material editing. Prior approaches that rely solely on physically based rendering (PBR) of Gaussian representations struggle to achieve realistic relighting due to imperfections in reconstructed geometry, material estimates, and light transport estimation. At the same time, neural rendering methods often lack an explicit scene representation, limiting their ability to support interactive editing with fine-grained manipulation. TRON bridges these two paradigms. We use intrinsic decomposition priors from a learned inverse rendering model to regularize the material properties of a Gaussian field, and repurpose a ray tracer to provide radiometric guidance rather than final pixels. By treating this output as a structured 3D scaffold, we empower a lightweight neural renderer to bridge the domain gap between shading-model constrained estimates and photorealistic output. Our key insight is that the combination of explicit 3D knowledge with robust material priors provides speed and controllability, while neural rendering enables the synthesis of photorealistic images. To support real-world scenarios, we train our neural renderer with a multi-stage strategy consisting of large-scale pretraining and targeted fine-tuning on a newly constructed dataset of 2.1M rendered synthetic and real-world frames from 3D reconstructions. TRON outperforms Gaussian-based relighting methods in realism, and prior neural renderers in editability and speed. To the best of our knowledge, TRON is the first method to enable practical interactive applications in captured 3D environments, offering realistic appearance under dynamic geometric, lighting and material conditions.

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

Think Again or Think Longer? Selective Verification for Budget-Aware Reasoning

Test-time reasoning is increasingly used as a serving-time control knob, but extra reasoning is not uniformly valuable: it can repair failed attempts, waste compute on already-correct answers, or introduce harmful answer changes. We study this as a deployment allocation problem rather than a new-verifier problem. We introduce \sevra, Selective Verification for Reasoning Allocation, a serving-layer controller that decides whether to preserve a frozen solver's initial answer or invoke active verification. Using a frozen Qwen3-4B solver, we log intervention outcomes and train recoverability-aware gates from serving-visible attempt state. On \mathfive, selective verification reaches 76.3\% accuracy, compared with 75.5\% for always verifying, while reducing post-generation tokens by 26.8\% and harmful flips from 2.2\% to 1.0\%. However, an 8,192-token initial solve reaches 76.0\% accuracy with 28\% fewer total model tokens, showing that selective recovery is useful but not the best tested cost frontier. In frozen transfer to \gsm, the selective policy verifies only 3.0\% of examples, improves accuracy from 93.4\% to 94.5\%, and reduces verification tokens by 91.2\% relative to always verifying; again, a longer initial solve matches its accuracy with fewer realized tokens. On CommonsenseQA, always-on verification hurts, while Self-Consistency@5 improves accuracy at about five times the realized token cost. The resulting deployment rule is: tune the initial budget first, then use selective recovery when explicit checks, bounded retries, auditability, or regression-risk control matter.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Evolving Quantum Error-Correcting Encodings for Molecular Simulation

arXiv:2606.25870v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Useful quantum algorithms require many coupled discrete design choices. We study LLM-driven evolutionary program synthesis – a language model edits a program, an external verifier scores the result, and high-scoring programs are retained and re-mutated – as a tool for quantum-computing research. As a case study, we apply this loop to the Generalized Superfast Encoding (GSE), a fermion-to-qubit encoding whose prior molecular constructions reach code distance $3$. The search discovered interpretable constructor programs whose codes have exact distance $5$ on the molecular instances tested, and distance $6$ on one $20$-mode instance, under strict stabilizer-coset semantics. To our knowledge these are the first GSE/superfast encodings beyond distance $3$ for dense molecular Hamiltonians. A second search, guided by verifier analysis of the first artifact, found a circulant constructor that reaches a five-qubits-per-mode floor on the tested $12$-, $14$-, $16$-, and $20$-mode instances, with certified dense-rule fallback at the failing $18$-mode case. As secondary resource descriptors, in a code-capacity memory comparison at $p=10^{-3}$ the resulting encodings use $4.2$–$5.0\times$ fewer data qubits than a scoped per-mode Jordan–Wigner $+$ $[[25,1,5]]$ surface route and have $3.4$–$8.2\times$ lower logical-failure rates under finite-weight decoding tables with explicit truncation brackets; we claim no circuit-level fault-tolerance or Trotter-cost advantage. The search trajectory illustrates a general operating lesson: rewarding distance alone selects trivial dense graphs, whereas holding verified distance fixed and rewarding compression selects structured rules.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Smoothness-Based Derandomization of PAC-Bayes Bounds

arXiv:2606.19105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study PAC-Bayes derandomization for smooth loss functions. Our goal is to obtain generalization bounds that hold with high probability for deterministic predictors by exploiting smoothness properties of both the loss and the predictor class. We show that passing from the Gibbs predictor to the deterministic predictor at the posterior mean has a precise cost, given by the generalization gap of the Jensen gap class. We control this class through its Rademacher complexity, leading to bounds for deterministic predictors that involve flatness quantities expressed in terms of parameter Jacobians and Hessians of the score map. The framework applies to both bounded and unbounded smooth loss functions, and we specialize the results to linear predictors and smooth neural networks. Finally, the Jacobian and Hessian quantities appearing in the theory motivate a practical regularizer. For BatchNorm networks, we compute this regularizer with respect to effective BatchNorm weights obtained by folding the BatchNorm transformation into the adjacent affine weights. Experiments on CIFAR-10 illustrate the behavior of this regularizer under different batch sizes.

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

Bergson: An Open Source Library for Data Attribution

arXiv:2606.11660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data attribution is a promising field in interpretability that aims to explain model behavior through the influence of its training data, with applications including debugging undesirable model behavior and training dataset curation. However, significant engineering effort is required to perform it at scale, and many cutting edge techniques lack open-source tooling and support. Bergson is an open source library that aims to enable faster progress in the field by providing a host of techniques that scale to very large language models and pre-training datasets. The library natively supports on-disk gradient stores and multi-node distributed training, and provides quality of life tools for researchers. Finally, we introduce the first open-source implementations of three leading data attribution methods: MAGIC, SOURCE, and TrackStar. The library is available at https://github.com/EleutherAI/bergson .

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM: Element-Level Assessment of Randomized Controlled Trial Reporting Using Large Language Models

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) play a central role in assessing the benefits and harms of interventions. Incomplete reporting in RCT publications can compromise the verifiability and usefulness of RCTs. SPIRIT and CONSORT reporting guidelines aim to improve the completeness of RCT protocols and results publications, respectively. However, many RCTs are not reported completely. Checking manuscripts automatically could help authors improve the completeness of reports prior to publication. We previously annotated SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, a corpus of 200 articles (comprising 100 protocol-results publication pairs) using 83 checklist items drawn from SPIRIT 2013 and CONSORT 2010. We also trained machine learning models to automatically assess reporting at the item level. Each checklist item can include multiple constituent elements (i.e., specific details required for that item), and an item might be considered fully reported when all of its elements are present. However, prior work does not explicitly capture or evaluate reporting at the element level. To address this gap, we extended SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM by incorporating element-level annotations and using them to assess reporting completeness (SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM). We formulated element-level assessment as a machine reading comprehension task, operationalized through 119 questions, where each question targets a specific reporting element within a checklist item. Using the 200 articles included in SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, two annotators independently answered 119 questions for 50 articles (25 protocol-results pairs) and resolved any discrepancies through discussion; the remaining 150 articles (75 protocol-results pairs) were assessed by a single annotator. We then developed an automated pipeline for element-level assessment using SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM. The pipeline first applies a PubMedBERT-based model to identify sentences containing item-level reporting information, then it uses a generative large language model (LLM; GPT-5) with chain-of-thought reasoning to answer element-level questions based on the retrieved evidence. Agreement between the two annotators was high (Gwet's AC1: 0.782) and our pipeline achieved high accuracy in identifying element-level reporting evidence (F1: 0.822, Gwet's AC1: 0.796). Ablation studies indicate that chain-of-thought reasoning and the inclusion of illustrative in-context examples modestly improve LLM performance on the machine reading comprehension task. SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM provides a benchmark for evaluating reporting guideline completeness at the element level, enabling assessment of RCT transparency beyond the simple presence or absence of checklist items and is publicly available at https://osf.io/kznx4/. The automated pipeline establishes a robust baseline for assessing RCT reporting and demonstrates potential as a practical aid for authors, reviewers, and editors to identify and address gaps in completeness and transparency of RCT reports.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Recovery thresholds for hidden weighted sparse graphs

arXiv:2606.14335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering structural information from noisy high-dimensional data is a fundamental task in statistical inference. We investigate the recovery thresholds for a graph hidden in a randomly weighted complete graph. Specifically, an unknown graph $H^* \in H_n$ is chosen uniformly at random, and hidden in a complete graph of $n$ vertices as follows: the weight of an edge $e \in H$ is distributed independently according to $P_n$; otherwise the weight is distributed independently according to $Q_n$. The goal is to recover almost all of $H$ from these edge weights. Assuming a local Lipschitzness of the Rényi divergence between distributions $P_n$ and $Q_n$, and a mild density condition for the graphs $H_n$, we give a unified characterization of the information-theoretic limit for recovering almost all of $H$ (also known as almost exact recovery). Our characterization connects the KL divergence between $P_n$ and $Q_n$ to the logarithm of the first moment threshold of $H$ in the Erdős-Rényi random graph model $G(n,p)$. Our lower bound also extends to the task of partial recovery, in which only a constant $\lambda$-fraction of $H$ needs to be recovered. Last but not least, for certain Bernoulli and Exponential regimes, and for Gaussian distributions, we are able to show an All-or-Nothing (AoN) threshold phenomenon at the exponential scale.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Scalable Peptide Design via Memory-Efficient Equivariant Transformer

arXiv:2606.25006v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Target-specific peptide design requires sequence and structure co-design under full atom geometric constraints. Latent generative frameworks offer an effective route for this problem by compressing fine grained atomic structures into block level latent representations and performing conditional generation in a compact latent space. However, the scalability of such systems depends heavily on the geometric backbone used throughout their encoding, decoding, and denoising components. We introduce MEET (Memory Efficient Equivariant Transformer), an E(3) equivariant backbone for scalable atomistic peptide modeling. MEET maintains coupled invariant scalar and equivariant vector feature streams, while reformulating geometric computation around memory efficient attention. It initializes vector features through global coordinate aggregation, incorporates pairwise distances through augmented query and key dot products, and injects covalent bond information through sparse bond adaptation. Integrated into a VAE and latent diffusion pipeline for full atom peptide generation, \model{} achieves linear memory scaling with atom count and improves generation quality over existing peptide design methods. Experiments on large scale AFDB derived datasets further show that the proposed backbone supports systematic model and data scaling, leading to better binding affinity, physical validity, and sample diversity.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Evolving Programmatic Skill Networks

arXiv:2601.03509v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study continual skill acquisition in open-ended embodied environments where an agent must construct, refine, and reuse an expanding library of executable skills. We introduce the Programmatic Skill Network (PSN), a framework in which skills are executable symbolic programs forming a compositional network that evolves through experience. PSN defines three core mechanisms instantiated via large language models: (1)~\opreflect for structured fault localization over skill compositions, (2)~progressive optimization with maturity-aware update gating that stabilizes reliable skills while maintaining plasticity for uncertain ones, and (3)~canonical structural refactoring under rollback validation that maintains network compactness. We further show that PSN's learning dynamics exhibit structural parallels to neural network training. Experiments on MineDojo and Crafter demonstrate robust skill reuse, rapid adaptation, and strong generalization across open-ended task distributions.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Autoregressive Processes on Riemannian Manifolds

arXiv:2606.24771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces a Riemannian autoregressive (R-AR) model of order one, generalising classical discrete-time stochastic processes to manifold-valued data. The model is based on two parameters, a parameter $\mu$ representing the intrinsic central tendency as the Fréchet mean and an autoregressive parameter $\phi$ controlling the stationarity and ergodic properties. Due to the inherent dependence structure of the R-AR process, the estimation procedure for these parameters necessitates new asymptotic results for dependent processes on manifolds. Thus, we establish a strong law of large numbers for the sample Fréchet mean set of ergodic Markov chains in proper metric spaces. By proving this general consistency result, we move beyond the limitations of classical i.i.d. theory to provide the mathematical foundation required for the strong consistency of our proposed estimators. The framework is validated through numerical simulations in the hyperbolic plane and an application to aerosol size distributions on the Fisher-Rao manifold, demonstrating how the proposed model can characterise mean-reverting dynamics in nonlinear geometries.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Hospital staff views on the visibility, role and impact of Acute Learning Disability Liaison Services in Wales: a service evaluation

People with a learning disability experience marked health inequalities. In Wales, Acute Learning Disability Liaison Services (ALDLS) are delivered by specialised learning disability services, and all roles within them are undertaken by Learning Disability Liaison Nurses (LDLN). These services aim to enable access to, and delivery of, secondary care by supporting reasonable adjustments, facilitating communication, and coordinating care for people with learning disability during hospital encounters. However, independent evidence of the impact of ALDLS on patient care remains limited. This evaluation tries to address this evidence gap by examining hospital staff perceptions of the visibility, role, and impact of ALDLS across Welsh Health Boards, with the aim of informing service design and development and improving secondary care access and care for people with learning disability. The service evaluation used a qualitative approach involving interviews and a focus group with hospital staff across the seven Welsh Health Boards who had experience working with or interacting with ALDLS staff to care for patients with learning disability. Findings cover six key areas including i) visibility and delivery of ALDLS, ii) Barriers and challenges to effective ALDLS delivery, iii) Enablers of effective ALDLS delivery, iv) Positive impacts for patients with learning disability, v) Negative impacts and unintended consequences when the service is absent or limited, and vi) Participants recommendations for future improvements of ALDLS. To synthesise the findings, we developed an overview diagram, which illustrates how ALDLS may influence care quality in acute hospitals. The overview places the liaison service at the centre, showing how organisational enablers and barriers shape its delivery, and how its core functions support improvements in safety, timeliness, effectiveness, efficiency, equity, and patient-centred care. From the findings we have identified recommendations for practice and policy. These include that ALDLS should be recognised as a core, safety-critical component of acute hospital care for people with a learning disability, rather than an optional add-on. In practice, services should be more visibly embedded within routine pathways, with consistent site-based presence, clear referral criteria, early identification through electronic flagging and notification systems, and routine involvement in multidisciplinary planning for complex admissions and procedures. At policy level, ALDLS provision should be recognised within equality and patient safety frameworks as an essential service requiring sustained investment, national minimum configuration standards, adequate staffing, and better-integrated digital systems to support continuity, equitable access, and person-centred care.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Rethinking Reward Supervision: Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation

Post-training of reasoning language models is commonly driven by supervised distillation and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Distillation often relies on chain-of-thought annotations that are expensive to obtain and may themselves be noisy, incomplete, or partially incorrect; even when the final solution is correct, an imperfect rationale can interfere with learning. Reinforcement learning with verified rewards, on the other hand, typically compresses evaluative feedback into a scalar signal, obscuring which aspects of a response should be improved. We propose Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation, a framework that incorporates rubrics as structured, fine-grained feedback for on-policy self-distillation. Our method conditions the teacher model on criterion-level rubrics and uses it to provide token-level guidance on the student's own sampled trajectories. This design avoids treating a single reference rationale as the sole supervision target. Instead, rubrics specify what a strong response should satisfy, enabling more fine-grained credit assignment over the reasoning process than scalar reward optimization. We instantiate this framework with a two-stage pipeline that first learns to generate task-specific rubrics and then trains a rubric-guided reasoner. We evaluate on a diverse suite of science reasoning benchmarks and results show that rubric-conditioned self-distillation effectively converts rubric-level criteria into token-level guidance over the reasoning process, surpassing GRPO by 1.0 points and OPSD by 0.9 points on average.

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

OmniPlan: An Adaptive Framework for Timely and Near-Optimal Network Planning Optimization

arXiv:2606.18105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network planning optimization is a fundamental problem across diverse domains, including transportation systems, communication networks, and power grids. It requires simultaneous optimization of multiple competing objectives under complex constraints. Existing network planning optimization frameworks rely on mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers, heuristics, and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models to compute planning decisions. However, they lack effective adaptability to diverse and dynamic user intents, thus leading to the trade-off between execution time and optimality. In this paper, we propose OmniPlan, an adaptive framework that achieves both timeliness and near-optimality in network planning optimization. To achieve the adaptability lacking in existing solutions, OmniPlan employs a large language model (LLM)-based interpreter to convert heterogeneous natural-language intents into a unified and quantifiable user-preference vector. Then it employs a mixture-of-experts architecture that integrates MIP solvers, heuristics, and DRL models as specialized experts, where OmniPlan adapts to diverse intents by dynamically selecting timely and near-optimal experts. Finally, it incorporates a DRL-based expert configuration module that fine-tunes optimization objective weights to align planning decisions with user-specific preferences. We evaluate OmniPlan with a representative real-world workload, i.e., distributed machine learning (ML), where we leverage OmniPlan to offload a wide spectrum of ML inference tasks, e.g., decision trees, SVM, naive Bayes, XGBoost, and random forests, onto a network of hardware devices. Our experiments on a real-world testbed indicate that OmniPlan achieves near-optimal and low-execution-time offloading for real-world ML inference tasks, reducing latency by up to 97.8\% and network device resource consumption by up to 11.5\%.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Non-invertible symmetries out of equilibrium: Eigenstate order and Floquet physics

arXiv:2508.14213v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Through the study of the Rep($D_8$) non-invertible symmetry, we show how non-invertible symmetries manifest in dynamics. Results are presented for dynamics generated by Hamiltonians as well as Floquet unitaries. For both examples, the role of the non-invertible symmetry is studied through the appearance of non-invertible symmetry protected edge modes. In addition, the role of the non-invertible symmetry for the Hamiltonian is studied through eigenstate order. In particular, by considering the effect of symmetry preserving disorder, the non-invertible symmetry is shown to give rise to degeneracies in the spectra of the Hamiltonian that can only be completely lifted at orders of perturbation that scale with system size. The eigenstates of disordered Hamiltonians, whose ground state correspond to non-trivial symmetry protected topological (SPT) states, are shown to have either trivial or non-trivial SPT order that are detected as non-zero expectation value of string order-parameters. In contrast, non-trivial SPT order is absent in the eigenstates of trivial SPT Hamiltonians with disorder. The interface between two different SPT phases host edge modes whose dynamics is studied numerically and analytically. The edge mode is shown to oscillate at frequencies related to different effective chain lengths that are weighted by the temperature, becoming an exact zero mode in the limit of zero temperature. A Floquet model with the non-invertible symmetry is constructed whose edge mode is shown to exhibit period-doubled dynamics at low effective-temperatures. The zero and period-doubled edge modes differ from those in conventional SPTs by being symmetric under the invertible symmetry, while being charged under the non-invertible symmetry.

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

Towards Understanding and Measuring COGNITIVE ATROPHY in LLM Behaviour

arXiv:2606.18129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent incidents involving LLMs used for mental-health support reveal a critical evaluation gap: surface-level safety scores do not capture how models behave across realistic, emotionally sensitive interactions over time. Existing benchmarks measure knowledge, safety, or static response quality, but miss whether LLM interactions help users keep reflecting, coping, and making decisions themselves. We formalize this missing dimension as COGNITIVE ATROPHY, a process-level behavioural measure in AI-mediated mental-health support distinct from safety and helpfulness. To measure it, we introduce COGNITIVE ATROPHY BENCH, a clinically grounded benchmark built from 1,576 fully human-generated counseling conversations, 15,680 turns, and 42,230 responses from five LLMs. Three clinical and neuropsychology experts developed a 20-attribute schema spanning user context, response behaviour, and global risk flags; six trained clinical reviewers applied it with span-grounded evidence, producing 5,324 reviewer judgments. We further introduce the User-Input Risk Index (UIRI), the Cognitive Atrophy Risk Index (ARI), and trajectory summaries. Across five LLMs, models show a consistent moderate-to-high level of atrophy-aligned behaviour across single and multi-turn settings. While models generally respond to overt safety cues, they adapt less reliably when users seek solutions or decisions. The dominant recurring patterns are directive advice, problem-solving, recommendation responses, topic shifts, and forms of validation that may reinforce dependence rather than reflection. Our work makes COGNITIVE ATROPHY measurable and provides a foundation for auditing model behaviour in sensitive LLM conversations.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Tensor-network approach to quantum optical state evolution beyond the Fock basis

arXiv:2511.15295v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding the quantum evolution of light in nonlinear media is central to the development of next-generation quantum technologies. Yet modeling these processes remains computationally demanding, as the required resources grow rapidly with photon number and phase-space resolution. Here we introduce a tensor-network approach that efficiently captures the dynamics of nonlinear optical systems in a continuous-variable representation. Using the matrix product state (MPS) formalism, both quantum states and operators are encoded in a highly compressed form, enabling direct numerical integration of the Schrödinger equation. We demonstrate the method by simulating degenerate spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) and show that it accurately reproduces established theoretical benchmarks - energy conservation, pump depletion, and quadrature squeezing - even in regimes where conventional Fock-basis simulations become infeasible. For high-intensity pump fields ($\alpha = 100$), the MPS representation achieves compression ratios above $3\cdot 10^3$ while preserving physical fidelity. This framework opens a scalable route to modeling multimode quantum light and nonlinear optical phenomena beyond the reach of traditional methods.

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

Prefill Awareness in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs. If AI models can recognize and act on the fact their prior assistant messages have been inserted or edited, the effectiveness and validity of these methods could be compromised. We investigate whether frontier language models can distinguish between tampered and untampered assistant-side context, a capability we call prefill awareness. To do so, we construct a binary preference benchmark across three prefill mechanisms, filtering for cases where models show consistent stances. We find that frontier models show substantial prefill awareness: Claude Opus 4.5 detects prefills opposing its preferences in 9-35% of cases with a 0% false positive rate when prompted; additionally, models often revert towards baseline behavior without explicitly reporting that the prefill was foreign. Controlled ablations later also show that detection and resistance rely on different cues, where stylistic mismatch mainly affects whether models flag a prefill as foreign, while preference mismatch mainly affects whether they revert toward their baseline answer. We also examine more realistic agentic settings such as misalignment-continuation evaluations and SWE-bench trajectories, where frontier models sometimes disavow prefilled assistant turns in ways that depend strongly on dataset, task success, and hidden formatting artifacts. Our results indicate that prefill awareness is already a substantial confound for some prefill-based methods. We recommend that model developers track this capability in frontier systems.

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

Time-Varying Audio Effect Modeling by End-to-End Adversarial Training

arXiv:2512.15313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has become a standard approach for the modeling of audio effects, yet strictly black-box modeling remains problematic for time-varying systems. Unlike time-invariant effects, training models on devices with internal modulation typically requires the recording or extraction of control signals to ensure the time-alignment required by standard loss functions. This paper introduces a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework to model such effects using only input-output audio recordings, without requiring a modulation signal extraction. We propose a convolutional-recurrent architecture trained via a two-stage strategy: an initial adversarial phase allows the model to learn the distribution of the modulation behavior without strict phase constraints, followed by a supervised fine-tuning phase where a State Prediction Network (SPN) estimates the initial internal states required to synchronize the model with the target. Additionally, a new metric based on chirp-train signals is developed to quantify modulation accuracy. Experiments modeling a vintage hardware phaser demonstrate the method's ability to capture time-varying dynamics in a fully black-box context.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Information Is Not Physical: Possibility Spaces, Erasure, and the Structure of Unrealized Alternatives

arXiv:2606.15120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The slogan ``information is physical,'' introduced by Rolf Landauer and developed through quantum information theory and black-hole thermodynamics, has achieved near-axiomatic status in modern physics. Yet the ontological status of information remains surprisingly underexamined: most discussions either reduce information to a form of energy or treat it as a purely mathematical object. This paper proposes a third position. I argue that information is neither a physical substance nor a free-floating abstraction, but rather the structure of physically realizable alternatives – a counterfactual structure that a physical system instantiates in virtue of the possibility space available to it. Building on Shannon's combinatorial definition, the Landauer principle, the no-cloning theorem, and the black-hole information paradox, I show that the informational content of any physical event is constituted by the set of outcomes that could have occurred but did not. This counterfactual reading dissolves several persistent confusions: it explains why erasing information dissipates heat without making information ``material,'' why quantum superposition is informationally richer than any classical mixture, and why information loss in black holes is physically significant beyond mere bookkeeping. The proposal sits within a structural-realist framework but departs from standard structural realism by locating the relevant structure in modal, not merely actual, relations. I conclude by sketching implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, and scientific ontology more broadly.

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

False Sense of Safety in Selective Signal Classification: Auditing Bound Tightness and Exchangeability for Risk Control

arXiv:2606.15153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selective prediction with distribution-free risk control promises that, with confidence 1-delta over the calibration draw, the error rate of accepted inputs stays below a user budget alpha. We audit this promise on signal-domain detectors – machine anomalous-sound detection (ASD) and AI-generated-image forensics – for four calibration rules: uncertified empirical thresholding (NAIVE) and certified Hoeffding, Clopper-Pearson (CP), and betting (WSR) upper confidence bounds. We report three findings. (i) NAIVE thresholding, common in practice, exceeds its declared budget in 49-73% of synthetic trials (n=200 calibration points) and in up to 68% of real-data splits: a false sense of safety rather than a broken theorem, since the rule never had a certificate. (ii) Tightness matters: CP and WSR certify substantial coverage where Hoeffding certifies none, with zero observed budget overruns under exchangeable splits. (iii) Under grouped deployment (unseen machine types or generators), certified rules overrun in 9-30% of trials – far above delta – showing the failure lies in the broken exchangeability premise, not in the bounds; a conservative per-group threshold restores validity at a severe coverage cost.

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

Uncertainty Quantification for Flow-Based Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606.18043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) combine vision-language backbones with expressive generative action heads trained via flow matching on large-scale robotic datasets. Despite their strong empirical performance in robotic manipulation, VLAs lack mechanisms to quantify confidence in their predictions and to detect when their actions may be unreliable. This presents a critical limitation for real-world deployment in non-stationary environments, where models inevitably encounter scenarios outside their pretraining distribution and may fail without warning. To address this, we derive an efficient method for quantifying epistemic uncertainty in flow-matching models by leveraging velocity-field disagreement (VFD) across a small ensemble. We successfully use this uncertainty estimate for failure detection during deployment and active fine-tuning of flow-based VLAs. To this end, we propose SAVE, a framework for uncertainty-guided active multitask fine-tuning that reduces the number of costly expert demonstrations required to adapt VLAs to new tasks. Through extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we demonstrate that VFD yields better-calibrated uncertainty estimates predictive of downstream performance, that VFD achieves strong performance in detecting failures, and that uncertainty-guided data acquisition with SAVE requires at least 22% fewer samples than baselines. In summary, our work shows that quantifying epistemic uncertainty in flow-based VLAs improves both failure awareness and adaptation. Project website: tum-lsy.github.io/uq_vla/.

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

FreqKD: Frequency-Decoupled Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Infrared Object Detection

Transfer learning from large-scale RGB foundation models to infrared (IR) imagery through knowledge distillation (KD) remains challenging due to fundamental differences in image formation physics. We investigate the spectral structure of the RGB–IR modality gap and observe that feature divergence is not uniform across spatial frequencies: low-frequency components (shape, layout) show greater cross-modal alignment than high-frequency components (texture, fine edges), which reflect modality-specific characteristics. Based on this analysis, we propose FreqKD, a frequency-decoupled distillation framework that applies asymmetric supervision adapted to each band's cross-modal consistency. The method employs strict mean squared error (MSE) on the low-frequency band to preserve shared structural information and a relaxed log-MSE loss (weighted at 0.1) on the high-frequency band to provide edge guidance while tolerating texture differences. Spectral divergence analysis on 500 paired samples shows that high-frequency divergence exceeds low-frequency divergence by a factor of 2.4x on average across all analysed transformer layers. On KAIST multispectral pedestrian detection, FreqKD achieves 64.1 mAP50, improving 2.4 points over the DINOv2 baseline. The learned representation transfers across datasets (FLIR ADAS, +2.1 mAP50), tasks (MFNet segmentation, +1.85 mean intersection-over-union), and architectures (ResNet-50, +1.0 mAP50). Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/freq_decoupled_kd-5E5A

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GermRL: Alleviating The Germline Bias In Autoregressive Antibody Language Models Through Reinforcement Learning

Antibodies are powerful therapeutics whose antigen specificity arises from sequence diversity shaped during development. Recently, language models trained on large antibody repertoire datasets have enabled the generation and screening of novel candidates, but these models retain a strong germline bias. As AI adoption increases in therapeutic workflows, it is crucial to develop models that harness the diversity of antibodies necessary for the discovery of mutations that encode desirable properties. Previous work explored the germline bias in masked antibody language models, yet the bias in generative autoregressive language models has not yet been addressed. Here, we present GermRL, a lightweight and modular reinforcement learning (RL) framework capable of alleviating the germline bias in pre-trained antibody autoregressive language models through group relative policy optimization (GRPO). GermRL achieves consistent one-shot generation of antibodies that satisfy specified mutation thresholds from germline while maintaining structural plausibility. Under the lowest and highest mutation thresholds tested (5 and 35 mutations from germline), GermRL scores 0.992 and 0.950 pass@1, respectively, compared to 0.398 and 0.034 for the pre-trained language model. Within GermRL, we introduce a key pair of modifications to GRPO that increase training efficiency by discouraging reward hacking under our antibody application. Furthermore, comparison of RL generated and natural antibody sequences reveals how RL based optimization can explore alternative evolutionary mutational patterns and residue compositional strategies while preserving key global properties of natural antibodies, including identifiable germline assignments, embedding-level similarity and comparable developability profiles. Thus, RL-trained generative models optimized to promote antibody mutations through diversity from germline provide a promising framework for navigating the antibody sequence landscape, enabling exploration of novel yet biologically plausible candidates for therapeutic design.