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

ShowFlow: From Robust Single Concept to Condition-Free Multi-Concept Generation

Customizing image generation remains a core challenge in controllable image synthesis. For single-concept generation, maintaining both identity preservation and prompt alignment is challenging. In multi-concept scenarios, relying solely on a prompt without additional conditions like layout boxes or semantic masks, often leads to identity loss and concept omission. In this paper, we introduce ShowFlow, a comprehensive framework designed to tackle these challenges. We propose ShowFlow-S for single-concept image generation, and ShowFlow-M for handling multiple concepts. ShowFlow-S introduces a KronA-WED adapter, which integrates a Kronecker adapter with weight and embedding decomposition, and together with a novel Semantic-Aware Attention Regularization (SAR) training objective to enhance single-concept generation. Building on this foundation, ShowFlow-M directly reuses robust models learned by ShowFlow-S to support multi-concept generation without extra conditions, incorporating a Subject-Adaptive Matching Attention (SAMA) and a Layout Consistency guidance as the plug-and-play module. Extensive experiments and user studies validate ShowFlow's effectiveness, highlighting its potential in real-world applications like advertising and virtual dressing. Our source code will be publicly available at: https://htrvu.github.io/showflow.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Investigation of Neural Network Methods for Reconstruction and Classification of Texture Images Under Conditions of Incomplete Information

The automated analysis of heterogeneous natural textures is frequently hindered by physical damage and data loss, presenting a significant challenge to computer vision. While deep learning has shown success in controlled environments, its application to complex geological materials under conditions of incomplete information remains underexplored. This study presents an integrated framework for the inpainting and classification of high-resolution core sample images. We propose an end-to-end pipeline that utilizes object detection for sample segmentation, followed by image inpainting using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with Contextual Residual Aggregation (CRA) to reconstruct missing high-frequency details. Subsequently, we evaluate the performance of modern Transformer-based (Swin, ViT) and CNN architectures on the reconstructed data. Our experiments revealed a critical divergence between reconstruction quality and downstream utility: despite high structural fidelity (PSNR 28.7~dB, FID 74.01), classification accuracy plateaued at 53\%. To improve minority-class detection, we propose a confidence-based hybrid ensemble that raises MCA from 48\% to 58\%. These results highlight the limitations of current state-of-the-art generative models, which may produce visually plausible but semantically ambiguous features ("hallucinations") that confound classifiers. This work provides insights into the dependencies between image reconstruction quality and classification performance, offering a reproducible baseline for future research in non-destructive testing and material science. Given that cross-well accuracy remains in the 49–53\% range, we position the resulting system as a decision-support and screening tool for lithofacies interpretation rather than as a fully autonomous classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/GalymzhanAbdimanap/Lithology_recognition

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Dengue and chikungunya virus transmission in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Dengue (DENV) and chikungunya (CHIKV) are understudied in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and across Africa despite evidence of transmission. We measured DENV and CHIKV IgG seroprevalences in Kinshasa Province, DRC, by antigen-capture ELISA, using dried blood spots from 2021. Force of infection (FOI) was estimated from age-stratified seroprevalences using Bayesian catalytic modeling. Among 1,250 participants, DENV IgG seroprevalence was 38.1% (95% CI: 34.5%-41.8%), increasing with age, and highest within peri-urban Kimpoko sites (54.9%). CHIKV IgG seroprevalence was 24.2% (95% CI: 21.1%-27.6%), increasing with age and comparable between peri-urban Kimpoko and rural Bu, with few seropositives in the city-center. DENV-CHIKV IgG co-occurrence was detected in 12.8% of participants. Time-varying FOI models provided best fit to age-stratified seroprevalences, with spatial variation detected. Sustained DENV and CHIKV circulation across Kinshasa highlights an under-appreciated transmission risk and underscores the need for strengthened arboviral surveillance in the DRC and surrounding region.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Multi-omics data fusion reveals divergent molecular signatures of intra-articular micro-fragmented adipose tissue and hyaluronic acid treatment in inflammatory-phenotype knee osteoarthritis

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) affects an estimated 374 million people worldwide and has no approved disease-modifying treatment. Intra-articular micro-fragmented adipose tissue (MFAT) outperformed hyaluronic acid (HA) on patient-reported outcomes in our recent double-blind randomized trial (ISRCTN88966184), yet the molecular basis of this differential efficacy is unknown, and the two interventions have not previously been compared at the level of their in vivo molecular response in human KOA. Here we apply an interpretable artificial-intelligence data-fusion framework, based on non-negative matrix tri-factorization, to longitudinally collected plasma from this cohort, integrating proteomics, N-glycomics, miRNA transcriptomics and patient genetics with prior protein-protein and miRNA-gene regulatory networks at baseline, one and six months. The framework jointly decomposes all data modalities at each timepoint into shared, interpretable factors, from which we derive data-driven pathways of genes and of miRNAs and recover new patient-gene and patient-miRNA associations. These pathways were biologically coherent, showing significant enrichment in Gene Ontology Biological Process and Reactome Pathway annotations. By six months, the two treatments left clearly distinct molecular signatures: HA remained dominated by canonical OA pathogenic processes, including cartilage-degrading effectors such as MMP13 and LIMK2 and markers of synovial inflammation, whereas MFAT shifted the systemic landscape toward chondroprotection, anti-inflammatory signalling and bone-cartilage homeostasis, with prioritized effectors including SIRT7 and NDUFC1. To our knowledge, these are the first systems-level molecular data directly comparing the in vivo response to the two treatments in human KOA, providing initial evidence that MFAT acts as a disease-modifying intervention and demonstrating the value of interpretable data fusion for uncovering treatment mechanisms in small translational cohorts.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion and World Models with Temporal Cache Compression and Sparse Attention

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable streaming generation, opening the door to long-form synthesis, video world models, and interactive neural game engines. However, their core attention layers become a major bottleneck at inference time: as generation progresses, the KV cache grows, causing both increasing latency and escalating GPU memory, which in turn restricts usable temporal context and harms long-range consistency. In this work, we study redundancy in autoregressive video diffusion and identify three persistent sources: near-duplicate cached keys across frames, slowly evolving (largely semantic) queries/keys that make many attention computations redundant, and cross-attention over long prompts where only a small subset of tokens matters per frame. Building on these observations, we propose a unified, training-free attention framework (FAST-AR) for FAST-AutoRegressive diffusion, consisting of three components: TempCache compresses the KV cache via temporal correspondence to bound cache growth; AnnCA accelerates cross-attention by selecting frame-relevant prompt tokens using fast approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) matching; and AnnSA sparsifies self-attention by restricting each query to semantically matched keys, also using a lightweight ANN. Together, these modules reduce attention, compute, and memory and are compatible with existing autoregressive diffusion backbones and world models. Experiments demonstrate up to x5 - x10 end-to-end speedups while preserving near-identical visual quality and, crucially, maintaining stable throughput and nearly constant peak GPU memory usage over long rollouts, where prior methods progressively slow down and suffer from increasing memory usage.

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

Does VLA Even Know the Basics? Measuring Commonsense and World Knowledge Retention in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606.19297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control. We introduce Act2Answer, a lightweight protocol that adapts VLM knowledge benchmarks to VLA evaluation by requiring agents to answer through action. Each question becomes a short tabletop episode where the agent performs a single object-placement action to select among candidate answers, yielding an action-grounded success rate with reduced control confounds. We curate a test suite of such environments across diverse commonsense and world-knowledge categories and introduce layerwise intent probing to localize answer-relevant information across the VLM backbone and action head. In a large-scale study of 7 VLA models and 9 VLM baselines, we systematically rank models across categories, finding that VLAs show solid performance on simple concepts while exhibiting larger gaps on richer semantic categories relative to their source VLMs, that VQA co-training is associated with better knowledge retention, and that answer-relevant signals peak in middle VLA layers but attenuate in upper layers. Act2Answer is available at https://tttonyalpha.github.io/act2answer/.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Scaling limits of the single-curve interface and outermost loops in the planar random field Ising model

arXiv:2606.13147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the interface separating $+1$ and $-1$ spins in the near-critical planar random field Ising model (RFIM) with Dobrushin boundary conditions has a scaling limit, whose law is conformally covariant and almost surely absolutely continuous with respect to SLE$_3$. The limiting curve can be seen as a massive version of SLE$_3$ in the sense of Makarov and Smirnov, but in a random environment. We then show that the outermost spin loops of the near-critical planar RFIM with $+1$ boundary conditions have subsequential limits and that any of these limits is almost surely singular with respect to CLE$_3$. This dichotomy between absolute continuity of the single interface and singularity of the outermost loops reflects the fact that a single interface does not explore enough of the magnetization field of the near-critical RFIM to detect the singularity of this field with respect to the critical Ising magnetization field, whereas the outermost spin loops do.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Unleashing Emergent Fermions with Rydberg Atom Simulators

arXiv:2606.19444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rydberg atom simulators, in both analog and digital modes, have attracted significant recent interest due to their versatile geometric reconfigurability. In this work, leveraging this feature, we propose two complementary approaches, one for each mode, to characterize emergent fermions in critical quantum many-body systems. In the analog mode, we assemble the Rydberg atoms in a "developable" (namely, preserving local couplings) Möbius band geometry to realize antiperiodic boundary conditions, where fermionic states reside. Spectroscopic measurement in this sector then reveals universal energy ratios of the bosonic and fermionic states. In the digital mode, we carry out a fermionic version of Kibble-Zurek ramping with a quantum circuit, directly addressing the fermionic scaling form. Reconfigurability allows an exponential speed-up of this task, with an $O(\log L\log\log L)$ circuit-depth overhead. Our work establishes the Rydberg atom simulator as a uniquely powerful platform to attack the notoriously difficult issue of experimentally probing emergent fermions that are nonlocally defined in a bosonic system.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Large deviation principle for friendship-biases in Galton–Watson trees

arXiv:2606.17381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider the friendship-bias of the vertices in an infinite rooted Galton–Watson tree. The friendship-bias of a vertex is the difference between the average degree of the neighbours of the vertex and the degree of the vertex itself. A vertex is said to be of type $\chi \in S$, with $S = \{-,0,+\}$, when its friendship-bias is, respectively, strictly negative, zero or strictly positive. We consider the fractions $f_l^\chi$ of vertices of type $\chi \in S$ along a random downward path up to branching depth $l \in \mathbb{N}$ and derive a large deviation principle (LDP) for the triple $(f_l^\chi)_{\chi \in S}$ as $l\to\infty$. The branching depth of a vertex counts the number of branchings that occur along the path that connects the vertex to the root of the tree. The rate in the LDP is $l$, while the rate function in the LDP is identified in terms of a variational formula minimising a relative entropy under a linear constraint. We focus on the case of binary branching, for which the rate function is already quite involved. We identify the qualitative properties of the rate function and show how it can be computed numerically. We briefly indicate how to proceed for more general branching and for vertex types along a tree consisting of a finite number of random downward paths. Our paper is the first to consider large deviations of vertex types.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Toward Entanglement Bootstrap for Conformal Field Theory in Any Dimension

arXiv:2606.12540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given a quantum critical wavefunction in any dimension, we propose a reconstructed Hamiltonian, analogous to the ones previously found for 1+1d CFT and for 2+1d bosonic liquid topologically-ordered states. We test numerically that, for known regularized approximate CFT groundstates (on the icosahedron and the fuzzy sphere), (1) they are close to the groundstate of their reconstructed Hamiltonian, and (2) the spectrum of their reconstructed Hamiltonian on the unit sphere has CFT properties (integer spacing of descendants) and matches known low-lying energies. We show that this provides an automated method to improve the finite-size effects in a fixed Hilbert space.

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

Exposing the Illusion of Fairness: Auditing Vulnerabilities to Distributional Manipulation Attacks

arXiv:2507.20708v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid deployment of AI systems in high-stakes domains, including those classified as high-risk under the The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), has intensified the need for reliable compliance auditing. For binary classifiers, regulatory risk assessment often relies on global fairness metrics such as the Disparate Impact ratio, widely used to evaluate potential discrimination. In typical auditing settings, the auditee provides a subset of its dataset to an auditor, while a supervisory authority may verify whether this subset is representative of the full underlying distribution. In this work, we investigate to what extent a malicious auditee can construct a fairness-compliant yet representative-looking sample from a non-compliant original distribution, thereby creating an illusion of fairness. We formalize this problem as a constrained distributional projection task and introduce mathematically grounded manipulation strategies based on entropic and optimal transport projections. These constructions characterize the minimal distributional shift required to satisfy fairness constraints. To counter such attacks, we formalize representativeness through distributional distance based statistical tests and systematically evaluate their ability to detect manipulated samples. Our analysis highlights the conditions under which fairness manipulation can remain statistically undetected and provides practical guidelines for strengthening supervisory verification. We validate our theoretical findings through experiments on standard tabular datasets for bias detection. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ValentinLafargue/Inspection.

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

How Task Structure Limits Multi-Agent Success: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

arXiv:2606.13733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) were expected to overcome the limitation of single-agent systems (SAS) through collaboration. However, under typicality conditions on the task's constraint graph and bounded inter-agent communication, we prove that the success probability of a MAS is closely tied to the connectivity of task constraints, where each agent has limited information-processing capacity. Specifically, the success probability decays exponentially with an information bottleneck that emerges from partitioning the task's constraint graph among agents. We define this quantity as the minimum cut cost $C_{\min}$ of the potential constraint graph of each task. This information-theoretic bound applies to both open systems with external feedback and closed systems without. We validate our theory on both synthetic experiments and real-world empirical data from SWE-bench submissions. From our framework, effective MAS design should incorporate task-inherent constraints alongside engineering optimization, and when $\Cmin$ is high, practitioners should restructure tasks rather than simply scaling agents or communication.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Humanoid Everyday: A Comprehensive Robotic Dataset for Open-World Humanoid Manipulation

arXiv:2510.08807v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: From loco-motion to dextrous manipulation, humanoid robots have made remarkable strides in demonstrating complex full-body capabilities. However, the majority of current robot learning datasets and benchmarks mainly focus on stationary robot arms, and the few existing humanoid datasets are either confined to fixed environments or limited in task diversity, often lacking human-humanoid interaction and lower-body locomotion. Moreover, there are a few standardized evaluation platforms for benchmarking learning-based policies on humanoid data. In this work, we present Humanoid Everyday, a large-scale and diverse humanoid manipulation dataset characterized by extensive task variety involving dextrous object manipulation, human-humanoid interaction, locomotion-integrated actions, and more. Leveraging a highly efficient human-supervised teleoperation pipeline, Humanoid Everyday aggregates high-quality multimodal sensory data, including RGB, depth, LiDAR, and tactile inputs, together with natural language annotations, comprising 10.3k trajectories and over 3 million frames of data across 260 tasks across 7 broad categories. In addition, we conduct an analysis of representative policy learning methods on our dataset, providing insights into their strengths and limitations across different task categories. For standardized evaluation, we introduce a cloud-based evaluation platform that allows researchers to seamlessly deploy their policies in our controlled setting and receive performance feedback. By releasing Humanoid Everyday along with our policy learning analysis and a standardized cloud-based evaluation platform, we intend to advance research in general-purpose humanoid manipulation and lay the groundwork for more capable and embodied robotic agents in real-world scenarios. Our dataset, data collection code, and cloud evaluation website are made publicly available on our project website.

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

Connections Between Pairs of Filters Improve the Accuracy of Convolutional Neural Networks

While researchers continue to find new and improved network structures for CNNs, most of the newly invented architectures still rely on the traditional pattern of stacking convolutional blocks and separating them with pointwise activation functions. However, there are drawbacks to a network purely building on pointwise nonlinearities. One alternative is to introduce a pairwise connection between two filters of a network. Typical connection functions use multiplications or the minimum operation to realize logical AND connections. In this paper, we go one step further by demonstrating that CNNs can benefit from more general connections, which include parameters that are learned. With such parameters, the network is able to implement different connections in different network layers and better adapt the connection function to the task at hand.

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

Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling

Reliable watermarking of panoramic imagery is fundamentally challenged by arbitrary 3D rotations. As panoramas are defined on the sphere, they naturally transform under the action of $SO(3)$, rendering conventional planar representations and augmentation-based robustness strategies inadequate and devoid of theoretical guarantees. To address this, we formulate panoramas as spherical signals and leverage $SO(3)$ representation theory to derive provably rotation-invariant descriptors. While spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations, the natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics which eliminate directional information and severely constrain embedding capacity. In this work, we introduce a principled third-order invariant construction by coupling higher-order $SO(3)$ irreducible representations via tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation. This yields a spherical invariant bispectrum that preserves phase information while remaining strictly rotation-invariant. Leveraging this property, we embed watermarks into higher-order spherical harmonic coefficients and recover them from invariant bispectral scalars, enabling reliable extraction under arbitrary 3D rotations. We provide a theoretical proof of $SO(3)$ invariance for it and demonstrate experimentally its near-perfect robustness to continuous rotations while maintaining high visual fidelity.

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

PaperJury: Due-Process Review for Bounded LaTeX Revision

Pre-submission hardening of human-authored LaTeX computer science papers differs from drafting assistance because it requires adversarial whole-paper review, explicit no-fix outcomes, and bounded artifact-safe revision. Existing writing assistants, critique generators, and judge-centered loops lack durable issue identity across rounds, deterministic routing from critique to adjudication, and manuscript control that can reject invalid concerns or defer author-dependent ones. We present PaperJury, a closed-loop review-verdict-revise-verify system built on a deterministic-versus-semantic split: deterministic orchestration manages decomposition, a frozen claim spine, a durable ledger, routing, stopping, and exact-once patch application, while semantic agents are limited to bounded review, judgment, and repair. PaperJury combines bounded holistic review, contestability-based routing, a due-process trial, and risk-proportional guard chains for anchor-bounded edits, yielding terminal outcomes of invalid-drop, valid-fixable, and author-required. In a two-arm expert-review evaluation on held-out Vision, natural language processing, and machine learning papers against four baselines, we assess issue quality, verdict and routing quality, edit safety, convergence behavior, and cost, supporting the thesis that load-bearing safety and completion logic should reside in deterministic orchestration rather than model discretion. PaperJury is available at https://github.com/u7079256/paperjury.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Clinical Study Protocol of the 'Biomarkers of Severity of COVID-19 Patients' (BIOMARCOVID) Project

Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has challenged health care systems worldwide, in certain areas exceeding hospital capacities and human resources. This has underscored the importance of having better tools to predict the outcome of potentially severe respiratory infections such as SARS-CoV-2. Predicting COVID-19 severity may allow physicians to better manage ICU beds and increase the chances of patient survival through appropriate management. During the toughest months of the pandemic, most physicians tried to identify patients that might develop severe forms based primarily on clinical features on admission (e.g., BMI, age). In this context, significant research has focused on identifying comorbidities, clinical manifestations, and routine blood biomarkers to predict disease severity. However, despite the demonstrated value of untargeted metabolomics in assessing severity, limited data exist on its use for identifying novel metabolite biomarkers that could improve both the sensitivity and specificity of outcome prediction. Our goal is to identify metabolite biomarkers that could enhance the predictive accuracy of standard medical biology data and clinical parameters. Methods and analysis This is a retrospective, observational, monocentric cohort study conducted at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Grenoble Alpes (CHUGA). The maximum number of eligible patients admitted for PCR-confirmed COVID-19 between March and December 2020 will be included. Severity outcome is defined using the WHO 10-category ordinal scale (mild: categories 4-5; severe: >5). Blood samples were collected within 48 hours of admission and analyzed for 62 routine blood tests and untargeted multiplatform LC-MS/MS metabolomics across four national platforms. Statistical analysis will include logistic regression with variable selection for the primary aim, and multi-block chemometric integration of clinical, biological, and metabolomics data as a secondary aim. Ethics and dissemination A study steering committee has been formed to ensure the accuracy of the collected data by thoroughly reviewing it prior to the data lock. All aspects of the study comply with ethical standards, including approval by the CHUGA institutional review board and adherence to CNIL Reference Methodology MR004 for the protection of participants' rights, privacy, and confidentiality. This study is registered on the French Health Data Hub (number F20210218154851). Results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, presentations at national and international scientific and clinical conferences, and reports shared with key healthcare system stakeholders.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Resilient Solution for Sewer Overflow Monitoring across Cloud and Edge

arXiv:2605.10592v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aging combined sewer systems in many historical cities are increasingly stressed by extreme rainfall events, which can trigger combined sewer overflows (CSO) with significant environmental and public health impacts. Forecasting the filling dynamics of overflow basins is critical for anticipating capacity exceedance and enabling timely preventive actions for CSO. We present a web-based demonstrator that integrates Deep Learning forecasting methods in both cloud and edge settings into an interactive monitoring dashboard for overflow monitoring, resilient to network outages. A video showcase is available online (https://cloud.bht-berlin.de/index.php/s/b9xt4T3SdiLBiFZ).

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

Light Forcing: Accelerating Autoregressive Video Diffusion via Sparse Attention

Advanced autoregressive (AR) video generation models have improved visual fidelity and interactivity, but the quadratic complexity of attention remains a primary bottleneck for efficient deployment. While existing sparse attention solutions have shown promise on bidirectional models, we identify that applying these solutions to AR models leads to considerable performance degradation for two reasons: isolated consideration of chunk generation and insufficient utilization of past informative context. Motivated by these observations, we propose \textsc{Light Forcing}, the first sparse attention solution tailored for AR video generation models. It incorporates a Chunk-Aware Growth mechanism to quantitatively estimate the contribution of each chunk, which determines their sparsity allocation. This progressive sparsity increase strategy enables the current chunk to inherit prior knowledge in earlier chunks during generation. Additionally, we introduce a Hierarchical Sparse Attention to capture informative historical and local context in a coarse-to-fine manner. Such two-level mask selection strategy (i.e., frame and block level) can adaptively handle diverse attention patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing sparse attention in quality (e.g., 84.5 on VBench) and efficiency (e.g., $1.2{\sim}1.3\times$ end-to-end speedup). Combined with other efficient solutions, \textsc{Light Forcing} further achieves a $2.0{\sim}3.0\times$ end-to-end speedup across diverse GPUs (e.g., 27.4\,FPS on RTX 5090 and 33.9\,FPS on H100). Code is released via this \href{https://github.com/chengtao-lv/LightForcing}{link}.

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

DP-Hype: Federated Differentially Private Hyperparameter Search

arXiv:2510.04902v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tuning hyperparameters in federated machine learning can substantially impact model performance. When hyperparameters are tuned on sensitive data, privacy becomes an important challenge and to this end, differential privacy has emerged as the de facto standard for provable privacy. A standard setting in federated learning is that clients agree on a shared setup, i.e., find a compromise from a set of hyperparameters, like a model's learning rate. Yet, prior work on privacy-preserving hyperparameter tuning is tailored to specific learning tasks, does not account for the privacy leakage of aggregated results, or offers a sub-optimal privacy-utility trade-off. In this work, we present our algorithm DP-Hype, which performs a federated and privacy-preserving hyperparameter search by conducting a federated voting based on local hyperparameter evaluations of clients. In this way, DP-Hype selects hyperparameters that lead to a compromise supported by a majority of clients, while maintaining scalability and independence from specific learning tasks. We prove that DP-Hype preserves the strong notion of differential privacy called client-level differential privacy and, importantly, show that its privacy guarantees do not depend on the number of hyperparameters. We also provide bounds on its utility guarantees, that is, the probability of finding good hyperparameters, and implement DP-Hype as a submodule in the popular Flower framework for federated machine learning. In addition, we evaluate performance on multiple benchmark data sets in iid as well as multiple non-iid settings and demonstrate high utility of DP-Hype even under small privacy budgets.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Disentangling Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Reward Design

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has driven major gains in LLM reasoning, and it is intuitive to assume this recipe will transfer well to multimodal models. However, multimodal models do two things: first, perceive what is in an image, then reason about what it implies. Because these stages are graded jointly, it is hard to tell how much room reasoning alone has to grow. We study this on algorithmic visual puzzles, where both components are necessary and show that perception, not reasoning, is the binding constraint. Replacing images with simple textual descriptions raises performance by over 20 points on average for Claude models. We then evaluate six reward designs aimed at inducing visual grounding during reasoning without chain-of-thought supervision. Training Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with GRPO, reward design induces long, structured reasoning with self-reflection and visual references, yielding a 5.56-point gain over the base model. These gains are, however, uneven; no single reward improves all categories, and rewards with verifiable accuracy signals trade out-of-domain transfer for in-domain accuracy. These results point to perception-aware reward design as a path forward, so that signals correct perception at its source rather than the reasoning that inherits its errors.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Kemeny's constant minimization for reversible Markov chains via structure-preserving perturbations

arXiv:2510.24679v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Kemeny's constant measures the efficiency of a Markov chain in traversing its states. We investigate whether structure-preserving perturbations to the transition probabilities of a reversible Markov chain can improve its connectivity while maintaining a fixed stationary distribution. Although the minimum achievable value for Kemeny's constant can be estimated, the required perturbations may be infeasible. We reformulate the problem as an optimization task, focusing on solution existence and efficient algorithms, with an emphasis on the problem of minimizing Kemeny's constant under sparsity constraints.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Wearable-Grade Lead Reduction Disproportionately Degrades ECG AI Performance in Elderly Patients: Evidence from PTB-XL and MIT-BIH

Consumer wearable devices increasingly use single-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) for cardiac monitoring, but these signals contain substantially less spatial information than the clinical 12-lead standard. Whether this reduction dispro- portionately affects older adults, who often present with more complex cardiac conditions, remains poorly understood. In this study, we evaluated the impact of lead reduction on AI-ECG diagnostic performance across age groups. A 1D resid- ual neural network was trained on 21,091 PTB-XL ECG recordings spanning five diagnostic superclasses and assessed using 12-, 6-, 2-, and 1-lead configurations. Under the full 12-lead setting, model accuracy declined from 84.5% in patients younger than 40 years to 66.2% in patients aged 75 years or older. Progressive lead reduction further widened this gap. Under the 1-lead configuration, accuracy decreased by 14.1 percentage points in the 75+ group but by only 0.4 percent- age points in the

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

The $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk on a Poisson point process gets trapped

arXiv:2606.11271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ on a homogeneous Poisson point process $\chi$ on $\R^d$ ($d\geq 1$), starts at the origin and at each step picks its next Poisson point among its closest neighbors according to i.i.d. labels having the same distribution as $K$. Our main result (Theorem 1) states that the number of Poisson points visited by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ admits an exponential decay whenever the random variable $K$ has a bounded support (BS). In particular, the $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk visits finitely many Poisson points if and only if $K$ satisfies Assumption (BS). To prove it, we introduce the key notion of pioneer point which allows us to deal with the region of $\R^d$ already explored by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$. Still under Assumption (BS), we also prove an exponential decay for the Euclidean length of the trajectory performed by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ (Theorem 2). Finally, and quite surprisingly, we exhibit an example of label distribution with bounded support for which the $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk discovers new Poisson points after a number of steps whose tail distribution is at least polynomial (Theorem 3).