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.LG) 2026-06-16

Diversity-Driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization via Nested Pareto Set Learning

arXiv:2606.15115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has emerged as a powerful approach to solving complex optimization problems involving multiple objectives. In many practical scenarios, function evaluations are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, necessitating optimization solely based on a fixed offline dataset. In this setting, known as offline MOO, the goal is to find out the Pareto set without access to the true objective functions. This setting suffers from the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue, where the surrogate model is not accurate for unseen designs. Due to the OOD issue, surrogate errors may cause the optimizer to select solutions that do not lie on the true Pareto front and are biased toward its extremes. To address this, this paper proposes Diversity-driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization (DOMOO), which aims to find out a diverse and high-quality set of solutions. First, DOMOO incorporates an accumulative risk control module that estimates the potential risk of candidate solutions and alleviates the OOD issue between the training data and the generated solutions. In addition, a nested Pareto set learning (PSL) strategy is proposed to jointly learn preference and PSL parameters, then optimize them, enabling adaptation to diverse Pareto front geometries. To further enhance solution quality, we design a diversity-driven selection strategy that extracts a representative and well-distributed set of final solutions. To achieve this diversity-driven selection strategy, we propose $IGD_offline$, a tailored indicator for the offline setting that considers both diversity and convergence, and avoids the bias of hypervolume indicator. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that DOMOO achieves the best average rank across tasks in both convergence and diversity among the compared methods.

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

The Complexity of Min-Max Optimization for Quadratic Polynomials

arXiv:2606.17000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove that computing approximate stationary points of min-max optimization over the hypercube is PPAD-hard for quadratic polynomials. This holds even when the polynomials are multilinear, each variable appears in at most three monomials, and the approximation factor is inverse polynomial. As a direct consequence, we obtain the first PPAD-hardness results for two-team zero-sum polymatrix games.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model for Standard View Classification of Echocardiographic Videos

Automated classification of standard echocardiographic views is crucial for efficient clinical workflow but faces three main challenges. First, publicly available datasets are scarce and limited in scale and view coverage. Second, the performance of some modern video-level architectures for echocardiographic view classification remains underexplored. Third, some view categories exhibit highly similar spatial appearances, making single-frame features insufficient for discrimination, while heterogeneous frame quality complicates robust temporal information fusion. To address these challenges, we release the Echocardiographic Videos of Nine Views (EV9V) dataset, comprising 5,138 videos, 910,579 frames, and 9 standard views, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest publicly available echocardiography video dataset. Using EV9V, we systematically benchmark representative video classification architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformers. Furthermore, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model (STFM), an efficient dual-stream CNN-LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) framework that jointly captures spatial anatomical structures and temporal cardiac dynamics. The proposed framework leverages uncertainty-aware learning to preferentially sample representative video segments during training and evidence-based fusion during inference, improving robustness to variations in frame quality across echocardiographic videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance across diverse video classification models, validating the effectiveness of uncertainty-aware spatio-temporal learning for echocardiographic view classification. The code is available at https://github.com/bgx666/stfm.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A tree-free approach to 3D Yang-Mills Langevin dynamic. Analytic estimates and the existence of a model for a regularity structure

arXiv:2605.14616v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using the multi-index approach to regularity structures due to F. Otto et al., we construct a regularity structure and a model for it associated to the stochastic Langevin equation for the 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills functional. For the model we also obtain global stochastic and global pointwise weighted Besov type estimates which hold almost surely. The model is defined as a limit of a sequence of smooth models introduced with the help of a mollified noise. When the mollification is removed the sequence converges in a certain topology defined with the help of the stochastic estimates. To obtain these results we develop the multi-index approach for systems of equations with vector-valued white noises. This project is motivated by the problem for constructing 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills measure and by the earlier results of the author on the related problem of canonical quantization of the Yang-Mills field on the Minkowski space.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Population-associated molecular variation in histologically normal breast tissue is context-dependent and associated with distinct transcriptional states

Population-associated molecular variation in breast tissue may contribute to differences in tissue biology and disease susceptibility, yet the extent to which such variation is shaped by underlying tissue states remains unclear. Here, we performed RNA-seq and lipidomic profiling of histologically normal breast tissue samples from African American (AA) and Caucasian White (CW) individuals, followed by conceptual integration of the resulting transcriptomic and lipidomic patterns. Unsupervised analysis revealed two distinct baseline transcriptional states (G1 and G2) that defined the primary axis of molecular variation across the cohort and corresponded to epithelial-enriched (G1) and vascular-enriched (G2) tissue contexts as determined by cell-type deconvolution. Global comparisons between AA and CW samples showed minimal transcriptomic differences, with only a single gene reaching significance after multiple testing correction. However, when stratified by baseline tissue state, 191 genes were differentially expressed within G1, with coordinated upregulation of extracellular matrix organization and proliferative/cytoskeletal processes in AA samples. These patterns were consistently supported across multiple enrichment approaches. No comparable population-associated differences were observed within G2. Lipidomic analyses showed partial but non-significant trends consistent with transcriptomic structure, suggesting that lipid variation provides complementary but limited support for baseline molecular differences, likely reflecting constraints of bulk tissue composition. Together, these findings suggest that population-associated molecular differences in normal breast tissue are context-dependent and emerge within specific baseline transcriptional states, where distinct biological programs can coexist and be differentially modulated. These findings highlight the importance of tissue heterogeneity in shaping molecular variation and its potential relevance to disease-associated tissue states.

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

Meta-classification of one-class classification models using ranking correlation and nearest neighbor

arXiv:2606.17858v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) techniques have been applied to various problems. However, applying ML to ML models is an unexplored direction. For this purpose, this paper considers a meta-classification of one-class classification (OCC) models, because all ML models could be approximated as OCC models. The proposal represents OCC models as normality rankings and classifies them using nearest-neighbor and ranking-correlation metrics. The experiment classifies OCC models, where classes correspond to training datasets, algorithms, and hyperparameters. The proposal achieves high accuracy when class labels are datasets. Moreover, it can classify algorithms when the training datasets contain the same class. In addition, the discussion highlights that the classification of OCC models is essentially the classification of datasets that treats multiple samples as a single input. The experiment demonstrates the classification of datasets using sleeping records. The proposed method can provide a unified solution for classifying OCC models, datasets, and rankings. Source code is uploaded to the public repository https://github.com/ToshiHayashi/ClassOCC.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

MedRLM: Recursive Multimodal Health Intelligence for Long-Context Clinical Reasoning, Sensor-Guided Screening, Evidence-Grounded Decision Support, and Community-to-Tertiary Referral Optimization

Real-world clinical decision support requires reasoning over heterogeneous and longitudinal patient information rather than answering isolated medical questions. However, current medical large language models and retrieval-augmented generation systems often rely on single-step prompting or retrieval, which can be fragile when clinical evidence is distributed across long electronic health records, medical images, sensor streams, guidelines, and referral constraints. This paper proposes MedRLM, a Recursive Multimodal Health Intelligence framework for long-context clinical reasoning, sensor-guided screening, and community-to-tertiary referral support. Instead of compressing all patient information into one prompt, MedRLM treats the patient case as an external clinical environment that can be recursively inspected, decomposed, retrieved, verified, and synthesized. The framework coordinates specialized agents for clinical text, longitudinal EHR, medical imaging, physiological sensor signals, guideline retrieval, uncertainty auditing, and referral planning. It further introduces a Clinical Evidence Graph Memory to connect patient-specific observations with retrieved evidence, standardized definitions, sensor-derived biomarkers, and referral criteria. A sensor-guided recursive triggering mechanism activates deeper reasoning when abnormal physiological or behavioral patterns are detected, while uncertainty-gated refinement supports clinician review for high-risk or low-confidence cases. We also outline a real-data evaluation design using public and credentialed clinical datasets spanning EHR, radiology, ECG, ICU time series, and referral-proxy outcomes. MedRLM aims to move medical AI from static question answering toward auditable, multimodal, and workflow-aware clinical decision support.

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

The Circumplex Degeneracy Behind the Rare-Class Limit in Affect Recognition

In-the-wild expression recognition persistently fails on a few rare emotions, and the standard explanation is class imbalance. Through a controlled multi-task study on two benchmarks, we show the failure is instead a property of affect geometry: the rare classes are degenerate on Russell's circumplex, and that degeneracy bounds what any loss or cost can achieve. Our instrument is a circumplex-cost optimal-transport term that prices expression confusions by their valence-arousal distance. The term improves the official score and expression macro-F1, but a control most studies omit shows the gain is not geometric: a uniform cost, equivalent to a generic confidence penalty, matches it on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.625) and significantly exceeds it on AffectNet (+0.057 over base, larger than the circumplex). What the geometry reshapes is the structure of the errors, making them affectively nearer the truth on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.031 against the uniform control), an effect that does not survive on AffectNet, where a visual confound at the far corner of the circumplex overwhelms it. The rare-class failure, by contrast, is stable across both datasets we examine: the degenerate pairs (anger-fear on Aff-Wild2, anger-contempt on AffectNet) resist frequency-based interventions, the transport term, and an action-unit-augmented cost built specifically to separate them. We conclude that progress on rare expressions requires representations that distinguish the classes, not supervision that reprices their confusions, and we provide the controls and metrics needed to tell the two apart.

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

Beyond the Blood Draw: Explainable Machine Learning for Non-Invasive Dysglycemia Risk Screening

arXiv:2606.16056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dysglycemia, encompassing both prediabetes and diabetes, affects huge numbers of adults worldwide, yet many of them remain undiagnosed. We developed and validated machine-learning (ML) models for non-invasive screening of dysglycemia risk that require no laboratory tests. Pooling data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2017–2023 (n=14,352), we trained six ML models with stratified 5-fold cross-validation and compared them with two established clinical risk scores. LightGBM achieved the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC=0.820, 95% CI: 0.806–0.835), outperforming the Finnish Diabetes Risk Score (0.745) and American Diabetes Association Risk Test (0.783). SHAP analysis identified age, race/ethnicity, and waist-to-height ratio as the most influential predictors. Subgroup analyses confirmed consistent performance across demographic strata (AUC: 0.735–0.832). These results demonstrate the feasibility of explainable, laboratory-free dysglycemia screening for deployment in community settings and self-tracking health applications.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Excess mortality in Germany during 2020-2023: A descriptive age-stratified analysis

作者:

This study investigates excess mortality in Germany in the years from 2020 to 2023 and its temporal alignment with reported COVID-19 deaths. The analysis uses annual and weekly all-cause mortality data and linear baseline trends derived from pre-pandemic years. Possible effects of demographic and population changes on baseline trends were also examined. Excess mortality was analysed over time and across age groups. Excess mortality was observed in all investigated years, rising from 2020 to its highest value in 2022. In absolute terms, the age group [≥]80 years accounted for the largest proportion of excess deaths throughout the study period. After 2021, elevated mortality relative to baseline was also observed in younger age groups down to 15 years of age, although absolute numbers remained substantially lower than in older groups. No evidence of excess mortality was observed for individuals younger than 15 years. Periods of excess mortality were temporally aligned with waves of reported COVID-19 deaths. In 2020, cumulative excess mortality after calendar week 11 closely matched reported COVID-19 deaths (43 876 vs. 41 835 deaths). Weekly excess mortality, reported COVID-19 deaths and wastewater viral load, when available showed strong temporal synchrony, although excess mortality increasingly exceeded reported COVID-19 deaths during later pandemic waves. Temporal patterns differed from the typical seasonal mortality peaks commonly associated with influenza epidemics during the early months of the year. In 2023, excess mortality declined substantially, possibly indicating a return to mortality levels before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Unified Causal-Origin Taxonomy of Distributional Shifts in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) systems often degrade when operating conditions differ from those previously encountered, reflecting distributional shifts in the underlying data-generating process. Such shifts may occur between training and evaluation, as in In-Distribution (ID) and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization, or within non-stationary settings where environment dynamics evolve over time. However, the formal relationship between these views remains unclear, and existing work mainly focuses on mitigation rather than the causal origin of shift within the agent-environment interaction. This work develops a unified causal-origin taxonomy that characterizes sources of distributional shift in RL and relates ID/OOD generalization to non-stationary settings. We transfer the classical dataset-shift principle from supervised learning to RL by reformulating distributional shift in terms of the generative interaction process. Using a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), we decompose the interaction into structural components, including the state distribution, observation process, policy, reward, and transition dynamics, together with the shifted-time boundary. The proposed taxonomy distinguishes internal, agent-driven, and external, environment-driven, distributional shifts. The shifted-time boundary perspective further characterizes explicit, implicit, and hybrid shifts. This formulation unifies ID/OOD generalization and non-stationarity as structured changes in the underlying process. We also introduce an evaluation framework for measuring shift impact and adaptation through performance degradation and recovery metrics. By grounding distributional shift in the causal-origin structure of RL, this work supports systematic analysis of robustness under distributional shift.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Principled RL for Flow Matching Emerges from the Chunk-level Policy Optimization

Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage attribution. In this work, we argue that aggregating consecutive steps into a coherent 'chunk' and shifting the policy optimization paradigm from GRPO's step level to the chunk level can effectively mitigate the negative impact of this issue. Building on this insight, we propose Group Chunking Policy Optimization (GCPO), the first chunk-level reinforcement learning approach for post-training flow matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPO achieves superior performance on both standard T2I benchmarks and preference alignment, with up to 43% relative gains over GRPO, highlighting the promise of chunk-level policy optimization. The code is available on https://github.com/xingzhejun/GCPO.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SAG: SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation with Query-Time Dynamic Hyperedges

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective approach for large language models to access external knowledge. However, existing methods rely on dense similarity retrieval and face inherent limitations in handling structured constraints and multi-hop reasoning. Incorporating knowledge graphs partially alleviates these issues, but at the cost of semantic fragmentation, high maintenance overhead, and difficult incremental updates. This paper introduces SAG (SQLRetrieval Augmented Generation), a structured architecture for retrieval and agent systems. Instead of pre-building a global static graph, SAG converts each chunk into one semantically complete event and a set of indexing entities, then uses SQL join queries to dynamically link events that share entities into local hyperedges,constructing, at query time, a dynamically instantiated local index structure. This design avoids the need for global graph rebuilding and ongoing maintenance; the system naturally supports incremental writes, concurrent processing, and continuous scaling through its reliance on standard database infrastructure. Across HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHop, and MuSiQue, three standard multi-hop benchmarks,SAG achieves the best results on 8 out of 9 Recall@K metrics, reaching 80.0% Recall@5 on MuSiQue, the benchmark with the highest multi-hop reasoning demands.SAG has also been deployed at a production scale of hundreds of millions of data items, with online retrieval latency kept within seconds. Project site and code are available at https://github.com/Zleap-AI/SAG-Benchmark.

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

Multimodal LLM-Empowered Re-Ranking for Generalizable Person Re-Identification

Domain Generalizable (DG) person re-identification (Re-ID) has attracted growing research interest due to its potential for deployment in unseen real-world scenarios. Most existing approaches address DG Re-ID by focusing on training domain-generalizable encoders but ignore the possible refinements in inference stage. In contrast, this work explores an alternative direction which improves inference re-ranking to enhance DG Re-ID. Conventional re-ranking methods typically rely on neighborhood-based distances to refine the initial ranking list, inherently depending on features produced by the Re-ID encoder. However, they deteriorate on target domains since the encoder lacks sufficient generalizability to produce reliable feature distances on unseen scenarios. Inspired by the remarkable generalization capabilities of recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we propose an MLLM-empowered distance metric to improve re-ranking in DG Re-ID. Specifically, we first adapt an MLLM to Re-ID data through supervised fine-tuning, which incorporates a domain-agnostic prompt and a query-candidate hard mining scheme. Then, the adapted MLLM is employed to compute a $\mu$-distance during inference, which is robust to domain gap and significantly enhances subsequent re-ranking performance. Our approach is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into previous re-ranking frameworks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently yields substantial performance improvements across multiple DG Re-ID benchmarks. The code of this work will be released at https://github.com/RikoLi/MUSE soon.

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

ARGUS: Stacked Multi-View Identity Mosaic Injection for Subject-Preserving Video Generation

Subject-preserving video generation is not solved by frontal-face similarity alone: a generated person must remain recognizable across motion, large viewpoint changes, expression shifts, occlusion, scale variation, and conflicts among text, first-frame, and identity references. We argue that the central bottleneck is the point-reference paradigm, which collapses identity into a single static observation entangled with pose, accessories, lighting, background, and camera statistics. We introduce Argus, a Wan-based framework centered on Stacked Multi-View Identity Mosaic Injection (SMII). SMII converts MLLM-selected image/video identity evidence into a 3*3 stacked mosaic, synchronizes the mosaic with the current diffusion time, and injects it as negative-time read-only memory in Wan's native token space. This turns identity from an external clean adapter or a single reference image into a compact dynamic distribution. Around SMII, an MLLM Identity Director selects informative identity moments and resolves condition conflicts, while no-cross-pair counterfactual training, Temporal Identity Annealing, and Adaptive Self-Likeness Guidance improve robustness without paired subject-video supervision. We further release HardID-Celeb, a public-figure identity-stress benchmark, and introduce YawScore and OccScore to probe large-yaw and first-frame-occlusion robustness. Argus achieves state-of-the-art results on OpenS2V-Eval Human-Domain, reaching 64.38 Total Score, 71.86 FaceSim, 51.62 NexusScore, and 79.14 NaturalScore. On HardID-Celeb, Argus obtains 76.80 FaceSim and improves YawScore and OccScore by 12.60 and 15.10 points over the strongest baselines, demonstrating that dynamic identity memory and large-scale counterfactual self-supervision are highly effective for subject-preserving video generation.

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

Sensorimotor World Models: Perception for Action via Inverse Dynamics

arXiv:2606.20104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perception for action suggests that representations of the world should be shaped not by visual fidelity alone, but by their relevance for actions. At the same time, latent JEPA-style world models advocate learning compact predictive states from high-dimensional observations to facilitate the prediction of future states, but end-to-end training of these models is nontrivial because representations may collapse if our only goal is to construct a latent state that is easy to predict. We introduce a sensorimotor world model (SMWM): a latent world model trained end-to-end with inverse dynamics regularization. This single regularizer addresses both issues: it prevents representation collapse and induces action-aligned representations. By forcing latent states to preserve information about the action underlying a transition, it biases the model toward the controllable degrees of freedom of the environment while discarding uncontrollable distractors. This yields stable latent world models trained from offline, reward-free trajectories, without frozen encoders, exponential moving averages, or complex latent regularizers. Empirically, SMWM learns compact, interpretable latent spaces and enables competitive planning performance across simple 2D and 3D control tasks.

17.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

On real-time calibrated prediction for complex model-based decision support in pandemics: Part 2

by Trevelyan J. McKinley, Daniel B. Williamson, Xiaoyu Xiong, James M. Salter, Robert Challen, Leon Danon, Ben Youngman, Doug McNeall Calibration of complex stochastic infectious disease models is challenging. These often have high-dimensional input and output spaces, with the models exhibiting complex, non-linear dynamics. Coupled with a paucity of necessary data, this results in a large number of non-ignorable hidden states that must be handled by the inference routine. Likelihood-based approaches to this missing data problem are very flexible, but challenging to scale, due to having to monitor and update these hidden states. Methods based on simulating the hidden states directly from the model-of-interest have an advantage that they are often more straightforward to code, and thus are easier to implement and adapt in real-time. However, these often require evaluating very large numbers of simulations, rendering them infeasible for many large-scale problems. We present a framework for using emulation-based methods to calibrate a large-scale, stochastic, age-structured, spatial meta-population model of COVID-19 transmission in England and Wales. By embedding a model discrepancy process into the simulation model, and combining this with particle filtering, we show that it is possible to calibrate complex models to high-dimensional data by emulating the log-likelihood surface instead of individual data points. The use of embedded model discrepancy also helps to alleviate other key challenges, such as the introduction of infection across space and time. We conclude with a discussion of major challenges remaining and key areas for future work.

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

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

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

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

SACE: Concept Erasure at the Semantic Singularity in Visual Autoregressive Models

The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has unlocked a transformative frontier for high-fidelity text-to-image synthesis, while heightening concerns over the safety alignment of generated content. Naive application of existing erasure techniques to VAR models causes catastrophic semantic collapse and visual artifacts, since they are predominantly designed for the homogeneous denoising steps of diffusion models. To address this foundational challenge, we first propose the Semantic Singularity Axiom, which posits that any target semantic concept embedded within a prompt is definitively locked at Scale-0. Then rigorously validate this axiom through our proposed Incremental Semantic Saliency Analysis (ISSA),which also enable the community to transparently inspect the coarse-to-fine semantic injection process. Guided by this insight, we introduce the first scale-aware concept erasure framework (SACE) for VAR models. By strictly confining interventions to the first scale, our approach couples an Entropy-Regularized Erasure Objective to prevent high-entropy sampling degeneration, alongside a restorative preservation loss to safely anchor the integrity of entangled benign priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves surgical concept erasure performance across various domains with minimal training overhead, timely and elegently resolute the critical safety vulnerabilities inherent in emerging VAR architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE}{https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Understanding helpfulness and harmless tension in reward models

Reward models are a key component of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning language models toward both helpful and harmless behaviour. However, the internal mechanisms underlying these objectives and their conflicts remain poorly understood. We study alignment tension in reward models trained under helpfulness-only, harmlessness-only, and mixed-objective settings. We find that mixed-objective models often underperform single-objective models, indicating interference between objectives. Using activation-based methods, we identify neurons associated with each objective and study their functional roles via targeted ablations. We find that these neurons causally support their corresponding objectives while often negatively affecting the opposing one. We find that a substantial proportion of neurons are shared between helpfulness and harmlessness, and that these shared neurons exert a disproportionate influence on model behaviour, contributing to alignment tension. Additionally, our results provide insights and mechanistic interpretation into how alignment objectives are represented in reward models and why multi-objective alignment remains challenging, motivating future work on disentangled and controllable alignment methods.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MemTrace: Probing What Final Accuracy Misses in Long-Term Memory

arXiv:2606.17328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly maintain long-term memory of user facts across sessions. Yet such memory is usually evaluated by aggregating accuracy over question rows or episodes. Because this approach scores question rows independently, even when several questions probe the same fact, it cannot show how that fact behaves as conditions change. We introduce MemTrace, a benchmark whose unit of measurement is the knowledge point: a single typed fact about the user, rather than an individual question. MemTrace probes each fact along three controlled dimensions: memory age, defined by how many sessions ago the fact appeared in the history; question type, covering current state, earlier state, and trajectory of change; and evidence condition, covering present, missing, and contradicted-by-false-premise settings. Evaluating 13 memory-system configurations across four paradigms, we find that similar pooled accuracy hides different failures: recovering a fact's current and earlier states does not imply tracking how it changed, and safe abstention does not imply correcting a false premise. The dominant bottleneck is evidence use, not retrieval: when systems fail, the evidence was retrievable 10 times more often than it was missing. These results suggest that improving long-term memory requires better use of reachable evidence, not simply more storage or retrieval.

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

Automated reproducibility assessments in the social and behavioral sciences using large language models

arXiv:2606.13670v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reproducibility in the social and behavioral sciences is typically evaluated by independent researchers who reanalyze the original data to assess whether the published findings can be recovered. However, such approaches are resource-intensive and difficult to scale. Here, we show that large language models (LLMs) can automate reproducibility assessments. Using N=76 published studies with predefined claims from the behavioral and social sciences, we compare LLM-generated analysis with the original findings and human reanalysis. For 7 studies, the LLM could not produce a viable effect size estimate. For the remaining studies, our LLM pipeline recovered the original effect sizes in 41% of studies using a +/-0.05 tolerance in Cohen's d. Further, our LLM pipeline reached the same qualitative conclusion as the original study in 96% of cases, where conclusions indicate whether the reanalysis supports the original claim. For comparison, human reanalysts recovered the original effect sizes in 34% of studies and reached the same qualitative conclusion in 74% of cases. Together, these results show that LLMs can serve as a scalable tool for automated reproducibility assessment and provide a foundation for systematic auditing of empirical results in the social and behavioral sciences.

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

Post-Launch Capability Expansion of Vision-Language Models via Prompting for On-Orbit Spacecraft Inspection

Spaceborne inspection systems often deploy perception models prior to launch, after which updating model weights or expanding fixed label sets becomes operationally impractical. While supervised models can be integrated pre-flight, adding new semantic capabilities in orbit requires retraining and re-uploading parameters. We investigate whether prompt-driven vision–language models can enable post-launch semantic expansion, allowing new spacecraft components to be specified via natural-language prompts without modifying onboard weights. We evaluate zero-shot instance segmentation of spacecraft components under a strictly frozen, single-pass inference protocol on a test set of $129$ images of previously unseen satellites. Under fixed global thresholds and no post-processing, SAM3 achieves $0.385$ mAP@$0.5$ and $0.267$ mAP@$0.5{:}0.95$. Performance is strongly scale-dependent: large structural elements like spacecraft bodies ($0.639$ AP@$0.50$) and solar arrays ($0.598$ AP@$0.5$) localize reliably, while relatively small appendages like antennas ($0.221$ AP@$0.5$) and thrusters ($0.081$ AP@$0.5$) remain difficult. Prompt formulation influences performance, with structured prompts incorporating spatial and geometric descriptors yielding up to $82%$ improvement over short category-name prompts. The model operates within the memory and compute envelope of contemporary embedded GPUs, suggesting prompt-driven grounding can provide a practical mechanism for post-launch semantic extension of dominant spacecraft structures while highlighting limitations of zero-shot localization for fine-scale components under orbital domain shift.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Beyond Parallel Sampling: Diverse Query Initialization for Agentic Search

arXiv:2606.17209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling for agentic search typically increases depth (i.e., more turns and tokens per trajectory) or breadth (i.e., more parallel rollouts). Here we focus on breadth scaling, showing that standard parallel sampling yields diminishing returns, tracing this to query redundancy at the first turn. When models issue similar first queries across rollouts, the threads retrieve overlapping evidence, and subsequent turns are conditioned on this shared retrieval. We address this limitation with DivInit, a training-free intervention at the first turn. Rather than sampling k independent first queries, DivInit draws n candidates from a single call, picks k < n diverse seeds, and runs them as parallel trajectories. Across five open-weight models and eight benchmarks, DivInit consistently improves over standard parallel sampling, with average gains of five to seven points on multi-hop QA at matched compute. Code available at https://github.com/cxcscmu/diverse-query-initialization

25.
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.