Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

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

01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VLADriveBench: Evaluating CoT-Action Relationship in VLA for Autonomous Driving

Vision-language-action (VLA) models generate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning alongside driving trajectories, but existing benchmarks evaluate only trajectory quality and do not assess whether the CoT is relevant, consistent, or causally connected to the driving action. We introduce VLADriveBench, a framework that combines observational metrics (mentioning, hallucination, contradiction, action alignment) with a CoT intervention protocol to provide complementary views of the CoT-action relationship. Applying VLADriveBench to three models across two architectures, we find that the two analyses can diverge sharply: ORION scores highest on observational alignment yet its CoT is epiphenomenal, while Alpamayo v1.5 scores lower yet its CoT is strongly causal, with visual salience gating the extent of CoT influence.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Hierarchical Random Measures without Tables

arXiv:2505.02653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The hierarchical Dirichlet process is the cornerstone of Bayesian nonparametric multilevel models. Its generative model can be described through a set of latent variables, commonly referred to as tables within the popular restaurant franchise metaphor. The latent tables simplify the expression of the posterior and allow for the implementation of Gibbs sampling algorithms to approximately draw posterior samples. However, managing their assignments can become computationally expensive, especially as the size of the dataset and the number of levels increase. In this work, we identify a prior for the concentration parameter of the hierarchical Dirichlet process that (i) induces a quasi-conjugate posterior distribution, and (ii) removes the need for tables, leading to more interpretable expressions for the posterior, with both a scalable and an exact algorithm to sample from it. Remarkably, this construction extends beyond the Dirichlet process, leading to a new framework for defining normalized hierarchical random measures and a new class of algorithms to sample from their posteriors. The key analytical tool is the independence of multivariate increments, that is, their representation as completely random vectors.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Quantum Annealing Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Accurate Remaining Useful Lifetime Prediction

arXiv:2606.18503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Remaining useful life (RUL) estimation is central to predictive maintenance, where an unplanned failure can cost far more than the asset itself. Statistical degradation models miss the strong nonlinearity of real systems, and data-driven models often converge to suboptimal solutions in high-dimensional, non-convex search spaces. We propose a Quantum Annealing enhanced Q-Learning (QAQL) framework that couples the sampling behaviour of quantum annealing with the sequential decision making of Q-learning. Each Q-value update is encoded as a small quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) whose ground state is the greedy action; rather than acting as a deterministic optimizer, the annealer returns a distribution over near-optimal actions across many reads, and this stochastic action selection supplies the exploration that curbs premature convergence on nonlinear degradation trajectories. The QUBO is solved on the D-Wave Advantage system using minor embedding, with the annealer woven into the reinforcement-learning loop rather than bolted on after training. We validate QAQL on two public benchmarks: the NASA C-MAPSS turbofan engine datasets and a device-fleet predictive maintenance dataset. Averaged over many independent runs and across six error metrics, QAQL outperforms the classical and quantum baselines considered in this study, with statistically significant improvements. The results indicate that quantum annealing is a usable, not merely theoretical, optimizer inside a reinforcement-learning loop for industrial predictive-maintenance applications.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Towards One-for-All Anomaly Detection for Tabular Data

arXiv:2603.14407v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tabular anomaly detection (TAD) aims to identify samples that deviate from the majority in tabular data and is critical in many real-world applications. However, existing methods follow a ``one model for one dataset (OFO)'' paradigm, which relies on dataset-specific training and thus incurs high computational cost and yields limited generalization to unseen domains. To address these limitations, we propose OFA-TAD, a generalist one-for-all (OFA) TAD framework that only requires one-time training on multiple source datasets and can generalize to unseen datasets from diverse domains on-the-fly. To realize one-for-all tabular anomaly detection, OFA-TAD extracts neighbor-distance patterns as transferable cues, and introduces multi-view neighbor-distance representations from multiple transformation-induced metric spaces to mitigate the transformation sensitivity of distance profiles. To adaptively combine multi-view distance evidence, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scoring network is employed for view-specific anomaly scoring and entropy-regularized gated fusion, with a multi-strategy anomaly synthesis mechanism to support training under the one-class constraint. Extensive experiments on 34 datasets from 14 domains demonstrate that OFA-TAD achieves superior anomaly detection performance and strong cross-domain generalizability under the strict OFA setting. The source code is available at https://github.com/Shiy-Li/OFA-TAD.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

A Two-Stage Interpretable Framework for Predicting Plant-Derived Small RNA Targets on Human 3'UTRs

作者:

Can plant-derived small RNAs target human mRNA 3'UTRs via complementary base pairing and produce experimentally detectable regulatory effects? This question concerns not only the fundamental feasibility of cross-kingdom RNA regulation but also the technological pathway for screening plant-derived active small nucleic acids. Existing miRNA target prediction tools are predominantly designed for endogenous miRNA-mRNA systems, exhibiting notable limitations when applied to cross-species small RNA inputs and small-sample wet-lab experimental adaptation. In this study, we developed a two-layer prediction framework, MetaLulu-AI. The first layer builds upon publicly available human miRNA-mRNA 3'UTR interaction data, utilizing XGBoost to learn foundational binding rules on human 3'UTRs based on 41 interpretable computational features, including seed region pairing types, local context sequence composition, site positioning, and RNA secondary structures. The second layer is tailored to the experimental system of plant-derived small RNAs and human target genes. It introduces 40 experimental samples using significant changes in endogenous protein expression as the regulatory standard (determined by Western blot or ELISA 48 hours post-transfection of small RNAs via Lipo3000). Using 52-dimensional computational features and the optimal transcript scores from the first layer as inputs, this layer employs TabPFN for experimental label adaptation. The first-layer dataset consists of 38,752 training samples, 5,536 validation samples, and 11,073 testing samples (totaling 55,361), with a positive-to-negative sample ratio of approximately 1:5.4. On the randomly split test set, the model achieved an AUC of 0.9686, a recall of 0.8523, a precision of 0.8080, and an accuracy of 0.9452 (at a decision threshold of 0.4797). Group-based splitting revealed that the model maintains high discriminative power for unseen genes (AUC = 0.9541), though its generalization ability for completely unseen miRNAs decreases (AUC = 0.7390). For the 40 experimental samples in the second layer, the TabPFN model achieved an average AUC of 0.7406 {+/-} 0.092 across ten repeated 70/30 random splits, outperforming the baseline of directly using the first-layer scores (0.3563 {+/-} 0.149); the average AUC in a 5-fold cross-validation was 0.770 {+/-} 0.177. SHAP analysis demonstrated a clear divergence in the discriminative basis of the two models: the first layer relies more heavily on the thermodynamics of the small RNA itself and the quality of canonical seed sites, whereas the second layer focuses more on the local UTR environment and statistical site features. Although the current second-layer results are constrained by sample size and gene coverage, this framework serves as a preliminary observation of the adaptation mechanism for cross-kingdom regulation experiments, and motivating future large-scale validation. Under stricter leave-one-gene-out and leave-one-small-RNA-out evaluation, the adapter exceeded the first-layer score baseline but only matched the majority-class baseline, underscoring that entity-level generalization is not yet established.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Marginal Alignment Does Not Guarantee Joint-Distribution Fidelity: An Official-Reference Audit of Nemotron-Personas-Korea with Cross-Locale Replication

Synthetic persona datasets cite alignment with official demographics as a basis for trust, yet downstream users consume them as joint structures across age, sex, region, occupation, education, name, and institutional status. Marginal alignment does not imply that these joints are preserved. We propose the Independence-Assumption Footprint (IAF), an audit primitive that operates on the attribute combinations a dataset card itself documents as treated independently. For each such combination, IAF compares the synthetic joint against an external official or institutional reference, using direct joint tables where available and rule-implied checks otherwise. Applied to NVIDIA Nemotron-Personas-Korea (one million Korean synthetic personas), IAF finds that NPK aligns with KOSIS marginals while three joints fail. The major-by-occupation distribution against the KEIS graduate universe carries a large conditional mismatch. The age profile of military service is institutionally inconsistent. Female representation in male-dominated occupations is substantially over-flattened toward parity, with the strict screening verdict mapping-dependent and age-robust under direct standardisation. A transferability demonstration across six further NPK locales finds locale-dependent rather than universal diagnostics, with reference-taxonomy cardinality confounding cross-locale flag counts. For synthetic personas used as silicon samples, marginal claims must therefore be paired with disclosure-anchored joint audits before reuse. The released audit artefacts (reference manifests, occupational crosswalks, derived metrics, reproducibility scripts) instantiate this protocol on the NPK family and are released for retargeting at other synthetic persona resources.

08.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Prescribed hormonal contraceptive use trends in the Estonian Biobank: A longitudinal observational study

by Jelisaveta Džigurski, Märt Möls, Kristi Läll, Hannah Currant, Mall Eltermaa, Estonian Biobank Research Team , Reedik Mägi, Lili Milani, Triin Laisk Background Hormonal contraceptives (HCs) are widely used and have well-documented population-level statistics. Previous studies with short follow-ups have focussed on individual HC use and side effects. However, the same aspects over longer periods, HC formulation switching, and the impact of genetic factors on HC side effects remain understudied due to the limited availability of suitable datasets. We investigated whether the Estonian Biobank (EstBB) is suitable for studying genetic risk for HC side effects. Methods and findings This is a longitudinal descriptive study combining prescribed HC purchase data collected from 2004 to 2022 with genetic and health data from 73,071 female EstBB HC users aged 15–55 at the time of purchase. HC usage was defined by the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes G02B, G03A, and G03HB01. Methods included calculating age-stratified annual user prevalence, inferring usage periods from purchases, assessing formulation switching, identifying the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10)-based side effect-related diagnoses and thromboembolism risk factors, and assessing carrier status for Factor V Leiden (FVL, rs6025) and prothrombin G20210A (PTM, rs1799963) genetic variants as proof-of-concept. Over 19 years, 20 HC formulations with five administration routes (oral pills, transdermal patches, vaginal rings, subdermal implants, intrauterine devices) were used. In the EstBB, combined HCs were the most commonly used among users aged 15–29, while progestin-only HC use increased with age and over time, comparable to the Estonian population. Overall, 64.2% (n = 46,920) of users switched formulations at least once, with 17.7% (n = 12,929) being rapid switchers. Side effect-related diagnoses were observed in 23.1% (n = 2,982) of rapid switchers, with excessive/irregular menstrual bleeding being the most common. Genetic analysis revealed that 5.3% (n = 3,886) of users carried at least one variant previously associated with increased thrombosis risk (3.5% (n = 2,556) carried FVL only, 1.8% (n = 1,276) PTM only, and 0.07% (n = 54) both). Carriers of thrombosis-associated variants had a significantly higher percentage of thrombosis (6.5%) than non-carriers (4.2%; OR = 1.61, 95% CI [1.40, 1.84], p 

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Latent World Recovery for Multimodal Learning with Missing Modalities

arXiv:2606.12362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study multimodal learning under missing modalities, with particular motivation from bioscience applications in which heterogeneous modalities are often only partially available when decisions need to be made. We propose Latent World Recovery (LWR), a framework built on two key ideas: (i) modality-specific embeddings from different modalities are aligned in a shared latent space, and (ii) a unified representation is constructed by fusing only the embeddings of the modalities that are actually available at both training and inference time. Rather than imputing missing modalities or requiring a fixed modality set, LWR treats each modality as a partial perception of an underlying latent state and performs availability-aware representation learning directly from the observed modalities. This combination of neighbor-based latent alignment and availability-aware modality fusion enables robust multimodal prediction under partial observation, while avoiding error propagation from explicit reconstruction of missing modalities. We evaluate the proposed framework on real-world incomplete multi-omics benchmarks and demonstrate that it provides an effective approach to downstream tasks such as cancer phenotype classification and survival prediction.

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

An affordable hardware-aware neural architecture search for deploying convolutional neural networks on ultra-low-power computing platforms

arXiv:2606.16290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW-NAS) allows the integration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in microcontrollers devices by automatically designing neural architectures that can fit prearranged hardware constraints. However, state-of-the-art HW-NAS target high-performance microcontrollers, whose power consumption does not meet sensing nodes requirements. This work presents a HW-NAS generating tiny CNNs that can run on ultra-low-power microcontrollers, featuring a lightweight search procedure enabling its execution even on embedded devices. Empirical results on three well-known benchmarks for tiny computer vision proved that the proposed HW-NAS was able to generate tiny CNNs while preserving state-of-the-art classification accuracy.

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

DeMix: Debugging Training Data with Mixed Data Error Types by Investigating Influence Vectors

arXiv:2606.11616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality training data is essential for the success of machine learning models. However, real-world datasets often contain mixed types of errors arising from systematic flaws in data preparation pipelines, including label errors, feature errors, and spurious correlations. Effective debugging of training data requires both detecting erroneous samples and identifying their specific error types to enable targeted repair, yet existing data cleaning and attribution methods fail to adequately address this dual requirement. In this paper, we propose DeMix, a novel framework that simultaneously diagnoses erroneous samples and their error types. Our key insight is that different error types produce distinct patterns on model behavior. DeMix captures such error-specific patterns by influence vectors that characterize how each training sample affects model predictions across all validation samples. We formulate training data debugging as a multi-label classification problem where a classifier is developed to predict error types directly from influence vectors. We further introduce an intervention-based learning strategy that guides the classifier to capture invariant rationales specific to each error type, ensuring the learned classifier generalizes effectively. Empirical evaluations on 11 tasks across tabular data prediction, recommendation systems, and LLM alignment demonstrate that DeMix significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a 22.61% improvement in data debugging F1-score and a 9.32% gain in task model performance after data repair. Code is available at: https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/DeMix.

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

ChronoID: Infusing Explicit Temporal Signals into Semantic IDs for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2606.14260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic IDs are crucial in generative recommendation, but with a fundamental limitation: temporal information is not well incorporated into semantic IDs. Instead, time influences recommendation only implicitly (e.g., through session construction heuristics, preference alignment, or sequence order), while existing semantic ID learning remains entirely time-agnostic. This design conflates interactions occurring under distinct temporal contexts into identical semantic representations, implicitly assuming that item semantics and user intent are temporally stationary. Such an assumption is misaligned with real-world recommendation scenarios, where evolving interaction rhythms play a central role. In this work, we investigate where and how the explicit time should be incorporated into semantic ID for generative recommendation. First, we systematically characterize the design space along three orthogonal dimensions of temporal signals and present a unified framework, ChronoID, for time-aware semantic ID learning. Then, by contributing a new time-explicit generation recommendation benchmark, ChronoID answers the questions: what is the effective way of infusing time, how to design the architecture, and where does the gain come from.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Conditioning Matters: Stabilizing Inversion and Attention in Diffusion Image Editing

Inversion-based image editing offers flexible and training-free control but still struggles with inversion accuracy and the trade-off between editing fidelity and background preservation. While recent methods improve inversion formulations or attention interactions, the role of textual conditioning in shaping diffusion dynamics and editing behavior remains underexplored. We show both empirically and theoretically that the precision of textual conditioning influences inversion stability by modulating the geometry of the diffusion velocity field, while also affecting the consistency of cross-branch attention during editing. These effects directly impact background preservation and semantic fidelity. Building on this analysis, we propose SimEdit, a conditioning-aware framework with two complementary components: (a) conditioning refinement, which constructs conditioning signals with improved semantic precision and structural alignment to facilitate stable inversion and consistent attention manipulation, and (b) token-wise cross-branch attention control, which separates edit-relevant and structure-preserving components and modulates them asymmetrically during attention manipulation. Extensive experiments on PIE-Bench demonstrate that SimEdit consistently improves both inversion reconstruction quality and editing performance over previous attention-manipulation approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/SimEdit.

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

Ranking Abuse via Strategic Pairwise Data Perturbations

arXiv:2604.17805v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise ranking systems based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), such as the Bradley-Terry model, are widely used to aggregate preferences from pairwise comparisons. However, their robustness under strategic data manipulation remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we study the vulnerability of MLE-based ranking systems to adversarial perturbations. We formulate the manipulation task as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem and propose an Adaptive Subset Selection Attack (ASSA) to efficiently identify high-impact perturbations. Experimental results on both synthetic data and real-world election datasets show that MLE-based rankings exhibit a sharp phase-transition behavior: beyond a small perturbation budget, a limited number of strategic voters can significantly alter the global ranking. In particular, our method consistently outperforms random and greedy baselines under constrained budgets. These findings reveal a fundamental sensitivity of MLE-based ranking mechanisms to structured perturbations and highlight the need for more robust aggregation methods in collective decision-making systems.

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

Computational Identifiability

arXiv:2606.19361v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identification conditions describe the computability of a target query or parameter of interest as a function of the type and amount of information available. In causal identification, this information is often expressed in the form of a causal graph, and data are observed or collected for some subset of variables in the graph. Target queries may be for a single effect alone or for a class of effects in a given model. The derivation of an identification algorithm then defines mathematically the process by which the desired causal effect(s) can be uniquely determined, theoretically, in expectation. Identifiability in expectation, or 'theoretical identifiability,' generally assumes asymptotic properties, infinite data, or other mathematically idealized conditions. In this paper, we explore a fundamental distinction between this theoretical, idealized notion of identifiability and a proposed alternative that is computation-bound. The framework we propose - 'computational identifiability' - is to instead define a finite computational search procedure for an empirical estimator. If this process finds an estimator empirically, within a desired error tolerance, then identifiability is satisfied, conditional on the specified assumptions of the search (i.e., a prior distribution over the parameters) and conditional on the search procedure itself. Through several experiments, we demonstrate how this framework allows us to answer fine-grained, practical identification questions, such as identification with small finite samples, with ambiguous graphical criteria, with mixed observational-interventional data, and across counterfactual data and estimands. Code is available at https://github.com/lbynum/metadentify.

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

Learning High Coverage Discriminative Parsimonious Rulesets

arXiv:2606.14156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning systems based on IF-THEN rule representations readily offer interpretability, making them a crucial focus in contemporary AI research. A key objective for such rule sets is to achieve both high discriminative power and interpretability. While existing state-of-the-art algorithms implicitly prioritize predictive accuracy, they often fall short on one or more quality metrics that ensure interpretability, such as coverage and parsimony of rule sets. Motivated by this, this paper propose the development of CDPR, which aims to create highly accurate and interpretable rule sets for classification problems. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt to establish such an approach. In this study, we introduce two algorithms rooted in submodular maximization, which not only provide provable guarantees on coverage but also yield rule sets that are both discriminative and parsimonious. We empirically demonstrate that rule sets learned through our approaches achieve higher accuracy and interpretability and has more than a 2.5-fold improvement in average coverage rates when compared to the next best algorithm.

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

DiverseDiT: Towards Diverse Representation Learning in Diffusion Transformers

Recent breakthroughs in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have revolutionized the field of visual synthesis due to their superior scalability. To facilitate DiTs' capability of capturing meaningful internal representations, recent works such as REPA incorporate external pretrained encoders for representation alignment. However, the underlying mechanisms governing representation learning within DiTs are not well understood. To this end, we first systematically investigate the representation dynamics of DiTs. Through analyzing the evolution and influence of internal representations under various settings, we reveal that representation diversity across blocks is a crucial factor for effective learning. Based on this key insight, we propose DiverseDiT, a novel framework that explicitly promotes representation diversity. DiverseDiT incorporates long residual connections to diversify input representations across blocks and a representation diversity loss to encourage blocks to learn distinct features. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512 demonstrate that our DiverseDiT yields consistent performance gains and convergence acceleration when applied to different backbones with various sizes, even when tested on the challenging one-step generation setting. Furthermore, we show that DiverseDiT is complementary to existing representation learning techniques, leading to further performance gains. Our work provides valuable insights into the representation learning dynamics of DiTs and offers a practical approach for enhancing their performance.

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

Bridging Data Gaps in Structural Fragility Modeling through Transfer Learning: Methodology and Case Studies

arXiv:2606.18567v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a methodology-centered transfer learning framework for fragility adaptation under domain shift, class imbalance, and scarce target labels while preserving engineering interpretability and supporting decision-making under uncertainty. Four transfer learning strategies (instance-based, parameter-based, hierarchical Bayesian, and multi-source) are demonstrated through three complementary case studies: (i) instance-based transfer learning via importance weighting, demonstrated on coastal bridge fragility using Hurricane Katrina observations; (ii) parameter-based transfer learning together with hierarchical Bayesian transfer learning, enabling partial pooling across strata and posterior uncertainty quantification, demonstrated on residential building fragility using Hurricane Ian observations; and (iii) multi-source transfer learning that fuses multiple analytical fragility models with learned source weights and regularized target-domain adaptation, demonstrated on seismic bridge fragility using observations from the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. Across these case studies, direct transfer of source models (i.e. using existing state-of-the-art models) fails under domain shift and severe class imbalance, while targeted adaptation substantially improves failure detection and predictive stability in low-data regimes. These findings highlight the need for systematic guidance on diagnostics, strategy selection, and uncertainty reporting when developing and adapting fragility models.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The Winner Takes It All

arXiv:2606.16885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The winner-takes-all (WTA) process takes place on an arbitrary graph. There is an agent on each vertex of the graph, and active agents at neighboring vertices play games. In each game, a randomly chosen agent wins, while the loser is eliminated from subsequent games. The games are played at random times; each game finishes instantaneously, and the games cease when each active agent has only losers among its neighbors. On the one-dimensional lattice, the fraction of winners in the final state is $e^{-1}$, and we also determine the fractions $w_j$ of winners who won $j=0, 1, 2$ games. For the WTA process on a segment, we determine statistics of the total number of winners (the average, the variance, and all higher cumulants), the probabilities of reaching the final state with the minimum or maximum number of winners, and establish the behavior near the boundaries. For infinite regular trees with vertices of degree $d$, i.e., Bethe lattices with coordination number $d$, the fraction of winners is $(2/d)^{d/(d-2)}$.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

IPSL-AID: Generative Diffusion Models for Climate Downscaling from Global to Regional Scales

arXiv:2604.03275v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Effective adaptation and mitigation strategies for climate change require high-resolution projections to inform strategic decision-making. Conventional global climate models, which typically operate at resolutions of 150 to 200 kilometers, lack the capacity to represent essential regional processes. IPSL-AID is a global to regional downscaling tool based on a denoising diffusion probabilistic model designed to address this limitation. Trained on ERA5 reanalysis data, it generates 0.25 degree resolution fields for temperature, wind, and precipitation using coarse inputs and their spatiotemporal context. It also models probability distributions of fine-scale features to produce plausible scenarios for uncertainty quantification. The model accurately reconstructs statistical distributions, including extreme events, power spectra, and spatial structures. This work highlights the potential of generative diffusion models for efficient climate downscaling with uncertainty

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Timage: A Generative Text-in-Image Paradigm for Fine-Tuning Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often lose track of the right image regions during fine-grained spatial reasoning, because a textual query rarely carries any explicit geometric anchor into the pixel domain. Prevailing remedies either rewire the model's weights or pad the prompt with verbose instructions, yet neither reliably pins the language to the correct visual coordinates without eroding the backbone's general competence. We introduce Timage, a paradigm that recasts multimodal understanding as an alignment problem solved at the input: the query is drawn, as a typeset overlay, onto the image itself. The placement and appearance of this overlay are produced by a Constrained Schrödinger Bridge (cSB), an entropic optimal-transport sampler that factorizes layout synthesis into two coupled stochastic stages. The first stage, Region Search, transports noise toward query-aligned image zones while obeying a hard occlusion barrier that protects salient foreground content; the second stage, Appearance Shaping, sizes the glyphs through an ``ink-budget'' regularizer so that the rendered text stays legible and visually balanced. The resulting overlay behaves as an explicit attention beacon that channels the model's focus along spatial semantics. On the VMCBench suite, Timage paired with a modest 7B backbone clearly overtakes far larger proprietary systems as well as parameter-tuned baselines. The study positions deliberate input reconstruction as a powerful, architecture-neutral lever for strengthening multimodal reasoning.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

SemPiper: Interactive Code Synthesis for Semantic Operators in Machine Learning Pipelines

arXiv:2606.14361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning (ML) pipelines require extensive data preparation, feature engineering, and integration across heterogeneous sources, making them tedious and error-prone to develop. While large language models (LLMs) have recently shown promise for assisting programming tasks, chat-based interfaces provide limited control over pipeline behavior and often produce code that is difficult to optimize or integrate into production systems. We demonstrate SemPipes, a novel programming model that extends ML pipelines with declarative, LLM-powered semantic data operators. SemPipes allows developers to specify high-level natural language instructions for data-centric operations, while seamlessly combining these operators with arbitrary Python code from standard data science libraries. For the semantic operators, it synthesizes specialized implementations at pipeline training time, conditioned on dataset characteristics and pipeline context, enabling the flexible yet controlled integration of LLM capabilities. We demonstrate SemPipes through SemPiper, an interactive interface that visualizes computational graphs of the pipelines, synthesized operator implementations, and optimization trajectories produced by an evolutionary search procedure. Attendees can explore three end-to-end scenarios, modify pipelines, inspect generated code, and observe how semantic operators are synthesized and iteratively optimized. The demonstration highlights how declarative semantic operators enable controllable, optimizable, and practical integration of LLMs into ML pipeline development.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Unreduced Persistence Diagrams for Topological Machine Learning

arXiv:2507.07156v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised machine learning pipelines trained on features derived from persistent homology have been experimentally observed to ignore much of the information contained in a persistence diagram. Computing persistence diagrams is often the most computationally demanding step in such a pipeline, however. To explore this dynamic, we introduce several methods to generate topological feature vectors from unreduced boundary matrices and investigate their theoretical and computational properties. We compared the performance of pipelines trained on vectorizations of unreduced PDs to vectorizations of fully-reduced PDs across several data and task types. Our results indicate that models trained on PDs built from unreduced diagrams can perform on par and even outperform those trained on fully-reduced diagrams on some tasks. We also benchmarked the computational performance of an algorithm for computing unreduced diagrams, which was implemented as a heavily modified version of Ripser. These computations are parallelizable and required an order of magnitude less memory on average compared to computing full persistence diagrams. Our results suggest that machine learning pipelines which incorporate topology-based features may benefit in terms of computational cost and performance by utilizing information contained in unreduced boundary matrices.

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

Want Better Synthetic Data? Steer It: Activation Steering for Low-Resource Language Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have become an effective tool for synthetic data generation, including for low-resource languages, where generated data can improve downstream task performance. Current best-performing approaches typically rely on few-shot prompting with target-language examples, which increases inference costs and may reduce diversity through lexical anchoring. In this work, we investigate activation steering as an alternative for low-resource synthetic data generation. We study two steering strategies: Language Steering, which targets the linguistic identity of a language, and Quality Steering, which captures well-formedness by contrasting human-written and backtranslated text representations. We evaluate these methods across four open-source LLMs, multiple layers, and 11 typologically diverse languages by generating sentiment and topic classification data and finetuning smaller classifiers. Steering is applied in both zero-shot and few-shot prompting settings and compared against non-steered counterparts. Our results show that steering on early layers consistently improves the diversity of generated data while often yielding stronger downstream model performance, particularly for low-resource languages.