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) 2026-06-19

Convex training of Lipschitz-regularized shallow neural networks

arXiv:2606.19652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we introduce a training procedure for shallow neural networks that promotes robustness against adversarial attacks. We solve a non-convex Lipschitz-regularized training program by introducing a convex restriction that can be efficiently solved to global optimality. Our approach can be employed as a post-processing step by taking a pre-trained network as an initial solution to then solving the convex program whose optimal network is guaranteed to be no worse than the initial one. We illustrate the improvements of our training procedure with experiments using real world datasets for regression tasks under an adversarial setting. We show numerically that solving our proposed convex program yields networks with lower objective values on the Lipschitz-regularized program compared to existing methods. Additionally, we show that on certain datasets, networks obtained using our convex training program are both more accurate and robust with respect to adversarial attacks.

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

Discovery and inference beyond linearity for epidemiological data by integrating Bayesian regression, tree ensembles and Shapley values

arXiv:2505.00571v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) is gaining popularity in epidemiology and healthcare studies for hypothesis-free discovery of risk and protective factors. ML is strong at discovering nonlinearities and interactions, but this power is compromised by a lack of reliable inference. Although Shapley values provide local measures of features' effects, valid uncertainty quantification for these effects is typically lacking, thus precluding statistical inference. We propose RuleSHAP, a framework that addresses this limitation by combining a dedicated Bayesian sparse regression model with an improved tree-based rule generator and Shapley value attribution. RuleSHAP provides detection of nonlinear and interaction effects, with uncertainty quantification at the individual level as a key contribution. We derive an efficient formula for computing marginal Shapley values within this framework. We apply RuleSHAP to data from an epidemiological cohort to detect and infer several effects for high cholesterol and blood pressure, such as nonlinear interaction effects between features like age, sex, ethnicity, BMI and glucose level. To conclude, we demonstrate the validity of our framework on simulated data.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FedSPC: Shared Parameter Correction for Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv:2606.13748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized federated learning (PFL) is one of the important approaches in federated learning for addressing statistical heterogeneity while enabling client-specific adaptation. Many PFL methods split the model into shared and personalized parameters, which are jointly trained on each client. However, this creates an optimization issue: shared parameters are updated by clients optimizing different local objectives, which can lead to inconsistent shared updates and weaken the shared representation. To address this problem, we propose Federated Shared Parameter Correction (FedSPC), a modular correction method for PFL. FedSPC applies control-variate correction only to the shared parameters of a given PFL method, while leaving personalized parameters unchanged. It can be integrated into three common PFL settings: shared feature extractors, shared classifiers, and fully shared models with local regularization. Experiments on CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet with ViT, ResNet-34, and VGG-11 show that FedSPC improves performance across representative PFL methods, including FedPer, FedRep, FedBABU, LG-FedAvg, and Ditto.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Decision-Theoretic View of Test-Time Training: When, How Far, and Which Directions to Adapt

arXiv:2606.15569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time training (TTT) adapts a pretrained model to each prompt via parameter updates, improving accuracy under pretraining-to-test distribution shifts. Yet, its performance often suffers from instability and sensitivity to hyperparameters such as update steps and subspace. We explain this behavior through a decision-theoretic lens, treating TTT as implicit Bayesian inference in the kernel regime. Under a Gaussian process benchmark, we show that TTT reduces prediction error when updates are spectrally matched to the prompt's signal-to-noise ratio and aligned with query-relevant eigen-directions. This perspective underpins the following results: (1) we show when fixed update steps and subspaces fail under distribution shifts, motivating adaptive strategies; (2) we prove that selecting update steps via prompt evidence admits a PAC-Bayes guarantee against overfitting; and (3) we characterize the Bayes-optimal update subspace under a linear-Gaussian correction model, yielding a scoring rule for selecting Transformer blocks and heads. Our theory helps explain the empirical instability of TTT, taking a step toward principled guidance for when, how far, and which directions to adapt.

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

Human-Guided Agentic AI for Multimodal Clinical Prediction: Lessons from the AgentDS Healthcare Benchmark

arXiv:2602.19502v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly capable of autonomous data science workflows, yet clinical prediction tasks demand domain expertise that purely automated approaches struggle to provide. We investigate how human guidance of agentic AI can improve multimodal clinical prediction, presenting our approach to all three AgentDS Healthcare benchmark challenges: 30-day hospital readmission prediction (Macro-F1 = 0.8986), emergency department cost forecasting (MAE = $465.13), and discharge readiness assessment (Macro-F1 = 0.7939). Across these tasks, human analysts directed the agentic workflow at key decision points, multimodal feature engineering from clinical notes, scanned PDF billing receipts, and time-series vital signs; task-appropriate model selection; and clinically informed validation strategies. Our approach ranked 5th overall in the healthcare domain, with a 3rd-place finish on the discharge readiness task. Ablation studies reveal that human-guided decisions compounded to a cumulative gain of +0.065 F1 over automated baselines, with multimodal feature extraction contributing the largest single improvement (+0.041 F1). We distill three generalizable lessons: (1) domain-informed feature engineering at each pipeline stage yields compounding gains that outperform extensive automated search; (2) multimodal data integration requires task-specific human judgment that no single extraction strategy generalizes across clinical text, PDFs, and time-series; and (3) deliberate ensemble diversity with clinically motivated model configurations outperforms random hyperparameter search. These findings offer practical guidance for teams deploying agentic AI in healthcare settings where interpretability, reproducibility, and clinical validity are essential.

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

NeST: Neuron Selective Tuning for LLM Safety

arXiv:2602.16835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing approaches often rely on heavyweight fine-tuning that is costly to update, audit, and maintain across model families. Full fine-tuning incurs substantial computational and storage overhead, while parameter-efficient methods, e.g., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), trade efficiency for inconsistent safety gains and sensitivity to design choices. Safety intervention mechanisms reduce unsafe outputs without modifying model weights, but do not directly shape or preserve the internal representations that govern safety behavior. We present NeST, a Neuron-Selective Tuning framework for efficient post-hoc safety alignment. NeST identifies safety-relevant feed-forward neurons via activation probing on vanilla harmful and benign prompts, clusters neurons with similar activation profiles, and trains shared cluster-level updates while freezing the rest of the model. Importantly, NeST is trained only on vanilla malicious prompts, without using jailbreak-specific attack data, yet generalizes robustly to diverse jailbreaks. The learned updates are then folded into the original weights, incurring no inference-time overhead. Evaluated on 14 open-weight language and multimodal models, NeST outperforms lightweight baselines and approaches full fine-tuning robustness with significantly fewer trainable parameters. On text-only models, NeST reduces average jailbreak attack success rate from 44.5% to 1.1% while training only 0.4M parameters on average. Across multimodal settings, it reduces ASR from 55.3% to 1.1%, and for downstream fine-tuned variants, it restores safety by reducing ASR from 53.8% to 0.8%. These results show that robust, maintainable safety alignment can be achieved by concentrating adaptation on localized, functionally coherent safety structures.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

CODEBLOCK: Learning to Supervise Code at the Right Granularity

arXiv:2606.18286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning of code LLMs typically applies uniform cross-entropy loss to all response tokens, implicitly assuming that every token provides equally useful learning signal. Recent token-level selection methods challenge this assumption in natural-language SFT by supervising only high-value tokens. However, directly transferring token-level masking to code can break syntactically and semantically coherent program units, because code depends on structural completeness and definition-use relations. We therefore propose CodeBlock, a structure-aware sparse supervision framework that selects structure-complete code evidence rather than isolated tokens. CodeBlock first selects high-quality instruction-response pairs, then partitions code responses into syntactically coherent coding items, estimates their utility by aggregating generalized cross-entropy over core logic tokens, and reranks them with data-flow reach and bridge signals to prioritize blocks that propagate or connect important program dependencies. During training, the full response remains available as context, while loss is applied only to selected code items and informative natural-language tokens. Experiments on six code-generation benchmarks show that CodeBlock achieves stronger average pass@1 than full-token SFT and competitive selection baselines, while using only 1.9% of supervised response tokens.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Acceptability of Three Co-Created Peer Support Interventions for People Living with Leprosy Reactions in Indonesia: A Mixed-Methods Pilot Study

Background: Leprosy reactions (LR) are immune-mediated complications associated with disability, emotional distress, and social isolation. We identified a gap in affected-individual-informed interventions that aim to improve the management of LR in healthcare settings. To address this gap, we assessed the acceptability of three peer-support interventions co-created with people affected by LR in Indonesia. Methods: Using an interactive learning and action approach, we co-created peer counselling, telesupport groups, and participatory video interventions which were piloted in an urban hospital and 13 rural community clinics. A mixed-methods design was applied with interviews, focus group discussions, and pre-post assessments involving four participant groups. Data were analyzed thematically using an acceptability framework. Results: One hundred participants were enrolled, and 92 completed the pilot intervention between November 2022 and July 2023. Qualitative findings showed that all interventions were acceptable. Peer counselling provided emotional reassurance through shared experiences and was perceived as trustworthy and supportive. Perceived burdens differed by setting, with time constraints in urban facilities and geographical barriers in rural clinics. Knowledge improved significantly among participants of peer counselling and telesupport groups in rural settings. Telesupport groups facilitated connection, information exchange, and continuity of care. Digital access and literacy limited participation for some, particularly in rural areas. The participatory video was perceived as reassuring and informative. Improvements in knowledge, attitude, practices, and mental well-being domain scores were observed among urban participants, but responses in rural settings showed less change. Participants and co-implementers reported increased self-efficacy, participants confidence to perform required behaviors within peer support interventions, with effects shaped by intervention and setting. Conclusions: The three co-created peer-support interventions were acceptable for individuals with LR in diverse healthcare settings. These outcomes highlight the importance and effectiveness of selective, and context-sensitive implementation of one or more peer-support modalities.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

How Inference Compute Shapes Frontier LLM Evaluation

arXiv:2606.17930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI evaluations are shifting toward harder tasks that benefit from longer trajectories involving tool use and iterative problem solving. As a result, performance is increasingly sensitive to the amount and allocation of compute available at test time ("inference compute"). Yet many evaluations still report performance at a single restrictive budget, meaning that low scores may reflect the evaluation setup rather than the model's underlying capability. To test this, we evaluate up to 12 frontier language models on seven challenging benchmarks spanning software engineering, mathematics, medicine, and cybersecurity. We use a controlled setup combining three simple inference-scaling interventions: larger token budgets, context compaction, and repeated submission attempts, guided either by the model itself or by minimal correctness feedback. We find three main results. First, larger token budgets substantially improve performance on benchmarks across multiple domains, including cybersecurity, FrontierMath, Humanity's Last Exam, and TerminalBench. Second, fixed-budget evaluations can increasingly understate frontier capability as models advance. Newer models reach higher performance at large budgets, where they unlock harder tasks and solve them more reliably. Third, benchmarks differ in which inference-scaling methods help most: repeated submission broadly improves performance, but the value of larger token budgets, external feedback, and parallel attempts varies by benchmark. Overall, our results show that benchmark scores are protocol-dependent. We therefore argue that evaluations should report capability as a function of inference-time compute, specify protocol choices explicitly, and compare model generations over a large shared compute range at matched budgets, especially in safety- or policy-relevant settings.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Structural basis for chaperone-guided assembly of RNA-induced silencing complex

The RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC), comprising an Argonaute (AGO) protein and a small RNA, is the central effector in RNA silencing. Small RNAs are loaded onto AGO as bulky duplexes in an HSP70- and HSP90-dependent process1–3, but the molecular mechanism remains poorly understood. Here we identify the human AGO–HSP90–p23 complex, which captures AGO in an RNA-free state, termed the AGO maturation complex (AMC). The purified AMC enables RNA loading and AGO folding, faithfully recapitulating de novo RISC assembly. Using cryogenic electron microscopy, we determined the structure of AMC bound to a microRNA duplex. In contrast to its conformation in the RISC, AGO adopts a highly open conformation in the AMC: the N domain and the RNA-binding module (PAZ–MID–PIWI) are fully detached and anchored to opposite sides of the HSP90 dimer, connected solely by the unfolded L1 linker. This arrangement exposes a positively charged cleft that accommodates an RNA duplex. AGO folding is facilitated by a small RNA duplex containing a 5′-terminal phosphate—but not by single-stranded RNAs—revealing a role for the RNA duplex as a chaperone-like cofactor that directs AGO domain assembly. These findings elucidate the RISC assembly mechanism and establish the AMC as a molecular tool for probing optimal RNA features and chemical modifications for the rational design of small interfering RNA therapeutics. Our study also sheds light on how chaperones, together with ligands, can guide the folding of client proteins. Structures of the AGO maturation complex reveal how chaperones and an RNA duplex drive assembly of the RNA-induced silencing complex.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Creating and Evaluating K-12 GenAI Assessment Graders Through Context Engineering

arXiv:2606.12422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The integration of large language models (LLMs) into educational assessment represents a transformative shift in classroom grading practices. While automated scoring systems and machine learning techniques have existed for decades, generative AI (GenAI) now enables educators to implement standards-based grading (SBG) with unprecedented efficiency and scale. This paper examines the theoretical foundations and evaluates an LLM grader that uses commercially available foundation models with context and prompt engineering to score student work against a rubric. Drawing on an empirical interrater agreement study using Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) data, we observed the Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) and Proportional Reduction in Mean-Squared Error (PRMSE) across mathematics, science, and ELA, using Claude Sonnet 4, Haiku 4.5, GPT-5, and GPT-5 Mini. The results demonstrate that LLM graders, especially when based on foundational models with more parameters, achieve substantial agreement with human raters in mathematics and science assessments, while the performances vary in ELA, suggesting generic foundation models can be effective at scoring in given contexts. Additional analysis of teacher and student feedback reveals strong acceptance of AI-generated narrative feedback but skepticism toward numerical scores, suggesting that LLMs function most effectively as formative tools rather than summative evaluators. Our findings indicate that thoughtfully designed hybrid models that combine AI efficiency with teacher judgment can reduce workload, enhance feedback quality, and support equitable assessment practices without displacing professional expertise.

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

FlowFake: Liquid Networks for Audio Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2606.19579v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio deepfakes generated by neural text-to-speech and voice-cloning systems threaten speaker verification and public discourse at scale. The core challenge is cross-dataset generalization: detectors trained on one synthesis pipeline collapse on unseen forgeries. We argue that this failure is primarily because of structural synthetic speech artifacts which are multi-timescale trajectory anomalies. Though every existing detector aggregates a fixed-window frame statistics, this misaligns the architecture with the signal. We propose FlowFake, a Liquid Time-Constant (LTC) architecture whose hidden state evolves via a learned ODE, with per-neuron adaptive time constants simultaneously resolving spectral (10ms) and prosodic (2s) cues. At only 34K parameters FlowFake achieves formal BIBO stability and O(dt^4) integration error. On a four-dataset cross domain benchmark (ASVspoof2019-LA, FakeOrReal, InTheWild, MLAAD), FlowFake reaches 75.29% on ASVspoof2019 trained only on FakeOrReal and 79.97% trained only on MLAAD. It outperforms RawGAT-ST and Whisper-DF on every evaluated pair and matching SSL Wav2vec2 (300x larger) at 0.01% of its parameter count. The source code is available on : https://github.com/GhostRider2023/FlowFake

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

eCNNTO: A Highly Generalizable ConvNet for Accelerating Topology Optimization

arXiv:2606.19921v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work proposes an element-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to accelerate density-based Topology Optimization (TO), termed eCNNTO. TO generally undergoes a large number of iterations, where finite element analysis is performed in every iteration, leading to the efficiency bottleneck especially when dense meshes are used to achieve high-resolution designs. To address this limitation, eCNNTO is proposed to build upon Kallioras et al. (2020), where a Deep Belief Network (DBN) was trained for every element to predict its near-optimal density from its early history, thereby skipping the great majority of iterations and significantly accelerating the TO procedure. However, the method lacks spatial correlations among neighboring elements and may lead to disconnected features in the final structure. The proposed method employs CNN with residual connections to address this issue. On top of it, a novel training strategy is introduced to further enhance the optimization efficiency, where the training dataset consists of the final stage density histories rather than early ones. This change can also help reduce the required training data size. eCNNTO requires only a small dataset to train and yet it can be generalized to problems with largely different boundary conditions, loading cases, design domain geometries, mesh resolutions, as well as non-design domains. In the end, the generalization capabilities and efficiency of eCNNTO are demonstrated through a variety of examples in two and three dimensions, achieving up to 90% and 97% reduction of iterations, respectively.

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

A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.

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

MentisOculi: Revealing the Limits of Reasoning with Mental Imagery

Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation. This shift has sparked interest in using intermediate visualizations as a reasoning aid, akin to human mental imagery. Central to this idea is the ability to form, maintain, and manipulate visual representations in a goal-oriented manner. To evaluate and probe this capability, we develop MentisOculi, a procedural, stratified suite of multi-step reasoning problems amenable to visual solution, tuned to challenge frontier models. Evaluating visual strategies ranging from latent tokens to explicit generated imagery, we find they generally fail to improve performance. Analysis of UMMs specifically exposes a critical limitation: While they possess the textual reasoning capacity to solve a task and can sometimes generate correct visuals, they suffer from compounding generation errors and fail to leverage even ground-truth visualizations. Our findings suggest that despite their inherent appeal, visual thoughts do not yet benefit model reasoning. MentisOculi establishes the necessary foundation to analyze and close this gap across diverse model families.

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

Task-Error Residual Learning for Real-Robot Five-Ball Juggling

arXiv:2606.16978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For residual learning that refines existing behavior, sample efficiency depends on two things: how much information each rollout returns, and how efficiently the learner uses that information. Reinforcement learning's standard scalar reward carries far less information than the directional task error that defines the task. Random exploration further discards whatever information each rollout returns. Through residual learning with directional task-error supervision and a task error model that drives sample selection, we achieve stable three-, four-, and five-ball juggling on anthropomorphic Barrett WAM arms. Despite planning and controlling through a simple, idealized stack, the system converges from the second attempt. The first attempt drops, after which task error decreases monotonically without further failures. In comparison, five-ball juggling typically takes humans years of practice. We compare residual learners across two ternary axes, the directional information in the learning feedback and the commitment of the analytic prior, spanning Newton-style Jacobian updates, Composite Bayesian Optimization, and stochastic search methods. Both axes prove necessary: neither directional feedback nor an informative prior suffices alone, and the simplest method that combines them, a fixed-Jacobian Newton update, is the most reliable. The learned residual tolerates substantial prior misalignment and degraded joint tracking, affecting mainly convergence speed. The bottleneck for residual learning on real robots is therefore the information content of the supervision signal and how the learner uses it, not the accuracy of the surrounding stack. Video documentation of all experiments is available at https://kai-ploeger.com/residual-juggling.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Sanjeevani: A manually curated anti-cancerous phytochemical database integrated with downstream analysis tools.

Background: Cancer continues to pose a massive global health burden. While plant-derived phytochemicals offer promising therapeutic leads, existing natural product databases often lack cancer specificity, dataset downloadability, and integrated screening tools. Methods: We developed Sanjeevani, an integrative web platform cataloguing 4,823 curated anticancer phytochemicals. Using a balanced dataset of 9,646 molecules, we trained Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, and K-Nearest Neighbours classifiers using a hybrid feature representation of RDKit descriptors and 2048-bit ECFP4 fingerprints. The platform also integrates AutoDock Vina for web-based molecular docking for binding affinity, poses prediction and ADMET-AI for pharmacokinetics estimation. Results: The SVM model demonstrated the strongest predictive capability, achieving a top test accuracy of 0.966 and a ROC-AUC of 0.992. Benchmarking across five docking tools confirmed that AutoDock Vina successfully balanced computational automation with literature-consistent binding affinity replication. The final architecture provides rapid interactive 2D/3D visualizations integrated with downstream analysis tools. Conclusion: Sanjeevani provides an open-access, one-stop pipeline that bridges the gap between raw natural product data and actionable computational screening, accelerating natural product-based oncology drug discovery.

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

From Tokens to Policy: Causal and Interpretable Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Identification

arXiv:2606.17010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) identification is crucial to explain the impact of an intervention and optimize our policies accordingly. Existing approaches trade expressivity for interpretability, but, if some active heterogeneity drivers are unmeasured, methods at both ends of this spectrum allow for spurious HTE characterization with no causal reading. In this work, we focus on controlled experiments and argue that an oracle HTE causal characterization via the latent interactors is now within reach, thanks to (i) more extensive pre-treatment measurements, i.e., multi-modal and multi-view, and (ii) scalable representations with minimal human supervision. We then re-frame HTE identification as a Markov-blanket discovery problem on a sufficient and aligned pre-treatment representation, and introduce Neural EXposure Interaction Search (NEXIS), an iterative procedure with provable and empirically validated consistent selection. We deploy NEXIS on two anti-poverty programs in Africa, augmenting each with satellite imagery capturing previously unmeasured environmental effect modifiers, leading to novel, interpretable and prescriptive guidelines to optimize the programs' next iterations.

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

Externalizing Research Synthesis and Validation in AI Scientists through a Research Harness

arXiv:2606.18874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems can increasingly automate scientific workflows, but the reasoning that links prior evidence, generated ideas, experiments and final claims often remains implicit inside model inference. Here we introduce Xcientist, a research harness that externalizes research synthesis and experimental validation into inspectable, contract-governed processes. Xcientist organizes literature evidence, idea states, implementation plans, ablation records and repair traces as persistent research artifacts, so that generated mechanisms can be grounded, executed, tested and revised without losing their evidential basis. We identify claim drift as a failure mode of automated research, where runnable artifacts no longer support the mechanism originally claimed. Across training-free memory systems, graph-structured traffic forecasting and multi-scale physics-informed neural networks, Xcientist preserves traceable trajectories from problem formulation to mechanism design, validation and bounded revision. These results suggest that AI scientists should be evaluated not only by their final artifacts, but by whether their synthesis and validation processes remain attributable, inspectable and scientifically accountable.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RoboPIN: Grounded Embodied Reasoning via Pinned Chain-of-Thought

arXiv:2606.15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning. However, current vision-language models rely on text-only or coordinate-augmented chain-of-thought, where entity references remain implicit and ambiguous. This may cause the reasoning process to decouple from visual evidence, entity references to drift across steps, and a causal disconnection between the reasoning trajectory and the final answer, with these problems further amplified in multi-view scenarios due to cross-view appearance changes. To address these issues, we propose Pinned Chain-of-Thought (\pincot{}), a structured reasoning paradigm that pins every reasoning step to visual evidence. \pincot{} introduces the concept of \reasoninganchor{}, which binds each task-relevant entity to a structured visual anchor with entity name, unique identity, view index, and spatial grounding, enabling consistent entity tracking across reasoning steps and views. We build a fully automated data generation pipeline to construct \dataset{}, a high-quality \pincot{}-formatted reasoning dataset. We then train \method{} through three-stage post-training that progressively injects embodied knowledge, structured reasoning ability, and process-supervised alignment, with rewards that directly constrain both anchor localization and identity consistency during reasoning. On 14 benchmarks covering embodied spatial reasoning, multi-view reasoning, and pointing, \method{} with only 4B parameters consistently outperforms 7B level open-source embodied models, achieving a 12\% average improvement over the strongest 7B baseline, Mimo-Embodied. Further analysis shows that \pincot{} improves grounding accuracy and cross-step identity consistency, validating the effectiveness of process supervision.

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

When Agent Automation Becomes Profitable: Quantifying and Insuring Autonomous AI Risk through Trace-Economic Underwriting

arXiv:2606.16465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents can now take irreversible actions in operational systems, but agent-caused losses are still not clearly assigned, priced, or transferred. Providers often disclaim consequential damages, users are left with uncompensated losses, and default human review limits the efficiency gains of automation. We ask when autonomous AI deployment can become economically acceptable despite failure risk. Our answer is to quantify risk at the customer-task-trace episode level and transfer it through insurance. Automation is acceptable when its expected benefit exceeds the premium, control cost, and remaining risk. This requires a defined role with bounded permissions and comparable traces. We introduce trace-economic underwriting, which maps tool-use traces to customer exposure and claimable loss, then uses this representation for pricing, control, and risk transfer. It uses deterministic economic labels rather than an LLM judge. In our trace-to-loss testbed, trace-economic pricing reduces pricing MAE from $17.7K to $569 and removes regressive cross-subsidy. A 300-trace expert audit accepts 295 labels unchanged. On 1,000 real SWE-smith traces, trace-conditioned controls reduce CVaR95 by 72%. Theorem~1 gives a finite-sample scope condition. We release code, labels, and audit sheets.

22.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

Nodeless superconducting gap and electron-boson coupling in (La,Pr,Sm)3Ni2O7 films | Science

作者: 未知作者

The discovery of superconductivity in Ruddlesden-Popper (RP) bilayer nickelate films under ambient pressure provides an opportunity to directly investigate electronic energy scales of the superconducting state and the pairing mechanism. We report angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements of superconducting (La,Pr,Sm) 3 Ni 2 O 7 thin films by developing an ultra-high vacuum cryogenic sample quenching and transfer technique. A superconducting gap of ~18 meV with coherence peaks is observed along the Brillouin zone diagonal. The finite gap persists across the entire Brillouin zone, revealing the absence of gap nodes. A kink is observed in the energy-momentum dispersion at ~70 meV below Fermi level, indicating an electron-boson coupling. The simultaneous observation of a nodeless superconducting gap and electron-boson coupling provides insight into the pairing symmetry and gluing mechanism in RP bilayer nickelates.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Semantic search for 100M+ galaxy images using AI-generated captions

Finding scientifically interesting phenomena through slow manual labeling campaigns severely limits our ability to explore the billions of galaxy images produced by telescopes. In this work, we develop a pipeline to create a semantic search engine from completely unlabeled image data. Our method leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate descriptions for galaxy images, then contrastively aligns a pre-trained astronomy foundation model with these embedded descriptions to produce searchable embeddings at scale. We find that current VLMs provide descriptions that are sufficiently informative to train a semantic search model that outperforms direct image similarity search. Our model, AION-Search, achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on finding rare phenomena despite training on randomly selected images with no deliberate curation for rare cases. Furthermore, we introduce a VLM-based re-ranking method that nearly doubles the recall for our most challenging targets in the top-100 results. For the first time, AION-Search enables flexible semantic search for over 100 million galaxy images, enabling discovery from previously infeasible searches, including the identification of 36 new extragalactic stellar stream candidates. More broadly, our work provides an approach for making large, unlabeled scientific image archives semantically searchable, expanding data exploration capabilities in fields from Earth observation to microscopy. The code, data, and app are publicly available at https://github.com/NolanKoblischke/AION-Search

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Sparsity, Superposition, and Forgetting: A Mechanistic Study of Representation Retention in Continual Learning

arXiv:2606.20431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning (CL) systems often forget previously acquired knowledge, yet the mechanisms driving forgetting remain hard to isolate in practice because real datasets entangle many factors. We present a controlled, toy-world framework that makes these mechanisms observable and testable. Using a synthetic generator-separator pipeline, we define ground-truth latent features, build tasks with tunable sparsity and overlap, and introduce measurable quantities for representation strength and superposition (directional overlap among features). We then study retention dynamics-the temporal change of representation strength by fitting sparse dynamical relations (via SINDy) between retention, superposition, and exposure history. A complementary task-level analysis based on effective rank characterizes how representational capacity is allocated across tasks. Our controlled experiments yield three takeaways. (1) Superposition tends to increase over time with transient dips at task boundaries, suggesting boundary-specific interference rather than steady drift. (2) Higher feature sparsity induces more superposition yet does not inevitably cause forgetting; when representations remain strong, forgetting can be reduced despite overlap. (3) Task-level effective rank grows with sparsity, indicating broader capacity usage under sparse regimes. Together, these results nuance the common intuition that more superposition leads to more forgetting by showing that overlap interacts with representation strength and capacity allocation. Our toy analysis provides falsifiable hypotheses and diagnostic tools for CL.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

More with LESS – Local Scene Representations for Tactile Imaging

arXiv:2606.14344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile imaging seeks to reconstruct the internal structure of soft objects through touch sensing, with applications in medical diagnosis and robotic manipulation. Recent self-supervised learning approaches have shown promising results, but rely on global, unstructured representations and robot-controlled sensing, limiting generalization and practical use. We propose Local Encoder for Spatial Sensing (LESS), an object-centric tactile representation that exploits the local nature of touch. The tactile scene is modeled as a grid of recurrent encoders with local receptive fields, whose states are fused to reconstruct 2D or 3D images of internal structure. This compositional design enables strong generalization: models trained on single-inclusion phantoms accurately image objects with multiple inclusions and varying sizes. The local structure further supports spatial uncertainty estimation. In addition, we enable hand-held tactile imaging via external pose tracking and human-like palpation data, and extend tactile imaging to full 3D reconstruction.