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.
Science (Express) 2026-06-11

Chemically induced skin tumors arise from long-lived stem cells of the upper hair follicle | Science

作者: 未知作者

The identification of the cancer cell of origin is a fundamental question in cancer biology. We used fluorescent lineage tracing of independent mouse skin stem cell populations, single cell transcriptomics, and Duplex sequencing, to identify the origin of chemically induced skin tumors. Tumors arose predominantly from Lgr6+ and / or Lrig1+ stem cells of the upper hair follicle, but only very rarely from the Lgr5 + and Krt19 + hair follicle bulge. Lgr6 + stem cells initiated by dimethylbenzanthracene responded to tumor promoter treatment resulting in clonal expansion of initiated cells carrying the canonical Hras Q61L mutation. Spontaneous mutations in Kras also clonally expanded, but did not generate tumors unless the Hras gene was deleted, thus revealing a competitive interaction between Hras and Kras pathways that influences clonal selection.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Certifying Nonclassical Proper-Time Histories with a Quantum Clock

作者:

arXiv:2606.12755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum clocks can acquire relativistic phases from motional or gravitational proper-time differences, but reduced clock dephasing alone does not certify nonclassical proper-time histories. We formulate this distinction as a channel-certification problem. First, we show that any two-level single-time dephasing signal, including one generated by an effective quantum proper-time label, admits a classical random proper-time representation. We then define the convex set of classical mixtures of experimentally specified proper-time histories and prove a Choi-rank separation criterion for conditioned coherent history recombination. A two-branch Ramsey protocol gives explicit bright- and dark-port population witnesses outside this classical set. The certification is operational and relative to the specified history set: it rules out classical mixtures of the same implemented proper-time histories, not arbitrary classical protocols with different histories or controls.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Risk-averse mean field games: exploitability and non-asymptotic analysis

arXiv:2301.06930v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we use mean field games (MFGs) to investigate approximations of $N$-player games ($N$pGs) with uniformly symmetrically continuous heterogeneous closed-loop actions. To incorporate agents' risk aversion (beyond the classical expected utility of total costs), we use an abstract evaluation functional for their performance criteria. Centered around the notion of exploitability, we conduct non-asymptotic analysis on the approximation capability of MFGs from the perspective of state-action distributions without requiring the uniqueness of equilibria. Under suitable assumptions, we first show that scenarios in the $N$pGs with large $N$ and small average exploitabilities can be well approximated by approximate solutions of MFGs with relatively small exploitabilities. We then show that $\delta$-mean field equilibria can be used to construct $\varepsilon$-equilibria in $N$pGs. Furthermore, in this general setting, we prove the existence of mean field equilibria. This proof reveals a possible avenue for incorporating penalization for randomized action into MFGs.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Epistemic Constitutionalism Or: how to avoid coherence bias

作者:

Large language models increasingly function as artificial reasoners: they evaluate arguments, assign credibility, and express confidence. Yet their belief-forming behavior is governed by implicit, uninspected epistemic policies. This paper argues for an epistemic constitution for AI: explicit, contestable meta-norms that regulate how systems form and express beliefs. Source attribution bias provides the motivating case: I show that frontier models enforce identity-stance coherence, penalizing arguments attributed to sources whose expected ideological position conflicts with the argument's content. When models detect systematic testing, these effects collapse, revealing that systems treat source-sensitivity as bias to suppress rather than as a capacity to execute well. I distinguish two constitutional approaches: the Platonic, which mandates formal correctness and default source-independence from a privileged standpoint, and the Liberal, which refuses such privilege, specifying procedural norms that protect conditions for collective inquiry while allowing principled source-attending grounded in epistemic vigilance. I argue for the Liberal approach, sketch a constitutional core of eight principles and four orientations, and propose that AI epistemic governance requires the same explicit, contestable structure we now expect for AI ethics.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Doctors, Wellness Influencers, and Probiotic Gummies: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Gut Health Claims and Financial Conflicts on TikTok

TikTok has emerged as a major source of health information, yet concerns persist regarding the accuracy of content and influence of financial conflicts. Gut health content is particularly vulnerable to misinformation. This study examined the relationship between creator profession ("medical" versus "non-medical") and the quality of gut health claims and the presence of financial conflicts on TikTok. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 412 TikTok creator accounts identified using the search terms "guthealth," "gutcleansing," and "digestion." One video per creator was analyzed. Creator profession was categorized as medical or non-medical. Health claim quality was coded as high, moderate, or poor. Financial conflicts (Showcase, Subscription, external links) were assessed. Modified Poisson regression was used to estimate prevalence ratios (PRs) of health claim quality (high versus poor- or moderate-quality) and financial conflicts between medical and non-medical creators, and negative binomial regression was used to evaluate associations between claim quality and number of video likes. Non-medical creators were more likely than medical creators to present poor- or moderate-quality health claims (adjusted PR: 2.33; 95% CI: 1.50-3.62). Most creators (92%) exhibited at least one financial conflict, and Showcase use was greater among non-medical creators (adjusted PR: 1.57; 95% CI: 1.02-2.42). Videos containing moderate- and poor-quality health claims received three times as many likes as videos containing high-quality claims. Non-medical creators disproportionately produced lower-quality gut health content on TikTok, and misleading claims received greater engagement. These findings highlight a misalignment between information quality and visibility, emphasizing the need for interventions promoting evidence-based health communication.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Deep learning for interactive and automated inner retinal layer segmentation in OCT images of patients with retinitis pigmentosa using limited training data

Purpose: New therapeutic strategies such as optogenetics have created a need for accurate tracking of inner retina degeneration in Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) patients. We introduce two tailored deep learning models to segment the RNFL (retinal nerve fibre layer), GCIPL (ganglion cell inner plexiform layer), INL (inner nuclear layer), CFT (central foveal thickness) and RPE (retinal pigment epithelium) in RP: The first is based on a Segment Anything Model (SAM), the second on nnU-Net. To our knowledge, SAM has not yet been applied to retinal layers in OCT data. Methods: SD-OCT images of a retrospective cohort of 37 RP patients were included. Data for four training cycles were prepared semi-automatically in MATLAB, then assessed and corrected by three expert graders. 1,700 segmented B-Scans from two open datasets were used for pretraining. For post-processing, semantic retinal boundary detection was developed. The final models, OCT-SAM and nnU-Net, were trained on 228 annotated RP scans. Detected layer thicknesses were validated against manual segmentation at 90 random points in 30 OCT B-Scans. Finally, OCT-SAM was tested on three RP cases with retrospective, longitudinal OCT data. Results: nnU-Net achieved a precision, recall and F-1 score of 0.96 while OCT-SAM performance resulted in slightly lower values of 0.93, 0.8 and 0.85, respectively. OCT-SAM measurements had low bias and good agreement with manual annotations, confirming reliability. Conclusions: OCT-SAM enabled fast data annotation and tool integration, whereas nnU-Net provided the best segmentation performance. OCT-SAM demonstrated longitudinal reproducibility and detected RP-characteristic pathologies and degenerative changes. Future work will extend OCT-SAM to 3D OCT segmentation.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Service-Induced Congestion in Memory-Constrained LLM Serving

arXiv:2606.15555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In large language model (LLM) serving, each request accumulates persistent graphics processing unit (GPU) memory during service as its key-value cache grows with every generated token. Under high concurrency, aggregate memory usage therefore increases endogenously over time: the service process itself creates future capacity pressure. When memory capacity is exceeded, systems evict active requests, discarding cached state and restarting them later, which wastes computation and reduces throughput. We develop a discrete-time dynamical model of memory-constrained LLM inference that captures admission, memory growth, and eviction under continuous batching. In the saturated-input regime, the system admits both eviction-free fixed points and limit cycles with evictions. For homogeneous workloads, we show that the eviction-free equilibrium is unstable and that, except for a Lebesgue-measure-zero exact-capture set, the system converges to a unique worst-case limit cycle that is asymptotically stable outside this exceptional set, with throughput losses as large as 50%. For heterogeneous workloads, we prove a stability criterion in the two-class common-input setting and explain how the survival-polynomial mechanism generalizes to multiple classes and heterogeneous-input lengths. Under an input-dominated scaling regime, coprime decoding lengths stabilize the eviction-free equilibrium, while non-coprime lengths create synchronized modes that drive instability. These results characterize when workload heterogeneity desynchronizes completions and helps stabilize memory-constrained serving. More broadly, we identify service-induced congestion as a structural instability mechanism and derive scheduling design principles for sustaining high throughput.

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

Private Prediction via PAC Privacy

arXiv:2601.14033v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning models are increasingly served behind APIs. This renders private prediction, i.e., privatizing a model's outputs rather than its parameters, a natural privacy target: model outputs are lower-dimensional and far more stable to training-data changes than weights. While differential privacy (DP) cannot effectively exploit this as it calibrates noise to worst-case sensitivity that is intractable to bound for non-convex models, we argue that PAC privacy is a natural fit for private prediction. It is instance-based, and calibrates noise to a black-box function's empirical stability to control mutual-information (MI) leakage. The missing ingredient is efficient, adaptive composition. Serving predictions means answering a long stream of adaptively chosen queries from untrusted users; existing composition either fails under adaptivity, grows quadratically, or reverts to input-independent, DP-like noise. We close this gap with a new adversarial composition result via adaptive noise calibration and prove that MI accumulates only linearly under adaptive and adversarial querying. Experiments across modalities show that prediction stability enables high utility even at a tiny per-query budget: on CIFAR-10, we achieve 87.79% accuracy with a per-query MI budget of $2^{-32}$. This enables serving one million queries while provably bounding membership-inference success to 51.08% – the same guarantee as $(0.04, 10^{-5})$-DP. Further, in the presence of auxiliary public data, the large volume of PAC-private predictions enables us to distill a publishable model that can be queried without limit. Concretely, 210,000 private labels on an ImageNet subset distill into a student reaching 91.86% accuracy on CIFAR-10 with membership inference success bounded by 50.49%, comparable to $(0.02, 10^{-5})$-DP.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Concept Modulation Models: A Unified Framework for Identifiability and Extrapolation

arXiv:2606.18509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable generalization in conditional latent variable models requires understanding both identifiability and extrapolation: how observed variation across attributes determines latent structure, and how that structure determines distributions at unseen attributes. However, existing identifiability and extrapolation guarantees are largely model-specific, with separate analyses in nonlinear ICA, causal representation learning, perturbation modeling, and related conditional latent variable models. We introduce concept modulation models (CMMs), an attribute-indexed class of conditional generative models with structure $A\to \Lambda \to C\to X$, where attributes select modulators, modulators induce latent concept laws, and concepts generate observed features. CMMs lift transition-based identifiability to conditional settings by showing that feature agreement on observed attributes induces a latent concept transition constrained by the CMM class. We express these constraints through attribute potentials, log-density ratios between attribute-conditioned concept laws, separating the generic lifting step from model-specific rigidity arguments. The same potentials control extrapolation: agreement at unseen attributes holds exactly when the transported attribute-potential identities extend to those attributes. This yields algebraic extrapolation criteria, identifies the common potential-based proof objects behind several existing identifiability and extrapolation results, and, when combined with the model-specific rigidity arguments in those works, recovers their stated conclusions.

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

Uncertainty Quality of VGGT: An Analysis on the DTU Benchmark Dataset

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) has already attracted a great deal of attention in a short period of time, not least due to the Best Paper Award at CVPR-2025. Similar to DUSt3R and MASt3R, VGGT aims to bring about a paradigm shift by replacing established methods like bundle adjustment and feature matching with a simple, unified, feed-forward neural network that predicts camera poses, depth maps, and dense 3D structure directly from multiple images of a scene in a few seconds. A key aspect is its ability to process an arbitrary number of views consistently in a single forward pass without any post-processing or iterative optimization. For photogrammetry, this opens new possibilities for real-time, scalable, and accessible 3D reconstruction. In this context, not only high reconstruction accuracy but also high-quality uncertainty estimates are crucial, as they foster trust and enable robust quality assurance. This paper therefore investigates the quality of VGGT's uncertainty predictions. The analysis identifies an effective confidence threshold for filtering VGGT's raw output and demonstrates that enhancing uncertainty quality holds strong potential for improving the accuracy of its 3D reconstructions.

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

How do Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Vision Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.

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

Non-negative Matrix Factorisation with Topological Regularisation

arXiv:2606.17531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the learning of interpretable bases in non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) by regularising the topology of the learned basis functions. Our approach is motivated by the observation that many data modalities can be viewed as non-negative functions on a structured domain, where the quality of a basis is intrinsically linked to its topology. However, naive methods for incorporating the topology of the support are often hindered by discreteness and threshold dependence, rendering them unsuitable for continuous optimisation. We address these challenges by employing persistent homology as a stable, threshold-free topological quantifier and by designing topological scores that integrate into the NMF objective as regularisers. The resulting framework encompasses spatially coherent image components, periodic time-series structures, and clique-like graph signals within a unified modelling language.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The distribution of the de Moivre experiment

arXiv:2606.15178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we focus on de Moivre random experience which allows us to introduce the $ s- $Bernoulli distribution and the bi$ ^s $nomial distribution. We present some probabilistic properties such as the expectation, the variance, the skewness and kurtosis coefficients, the moments and the generating functions. Then we establish that for $ s\in\mathbb{N} $, the bi$ ^s $nomial distribution converges to a limiting Poisson and normal distributions when $ n\rightarrow\infty. $

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

Benchmarking Local LLMs for Natural-Language-to-SQL Querying in Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing: An Empirical Benchmark on Consumer-Grade Hardware

Biopharmaceutical manufacturing organizations operate under regulatory frameworks such as FDA guidance, EU Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), and the EU AI Act, which can restrict the use of cloud-based artificial intelligence systems. Locally deployed large language models (LLMs) offer a privacy-preserving alternative, but their suitability for pharmaceutical manufacturing tasks remains underexplored. This study evaluates four open-source LLMs (Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B, Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 7B, and Meditron 7B) deployed locally via Ollama for natural-language-to-SQL generation over a pharmaceutical manufacturing database. A FastAPI-based evaluation platform, PharmaBatchDB AI, was developed using a synthetic Microsoft SQL Server database containing approximately 63,000 records across Batch, Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and Clean-In-Place (CIP) modules. Models were benchmarked on 60 domain-specific natural-language questions using metrics including SQL extraction rate, SQL compliance, factual consistency, ROUGE-L, hallucination rate, throughput, and latency. Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B, Llama 3.1 8B, and Mistral 7B generated SQL for all evaluation tasks, while Meditron 7B failed on nearly all tasks due to context-window limitations and poor SQL generation capability. Llama 3.1 8B achieved the highest SQL compliance, whereas Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B achieved the strongest overall text similarity and factual consistency. Performance differences between the two leading models were not statistically significant. The results show that code-tuned general-purpose LLMs outperform a domain-specific biomedical model on structured query generation for pharmaceutical manufacturing data. Although fully local, GxP-aligned NLQ systems are feasible on consumer hardware, current performance levels still require human oversight and downstream validation for regulated use.

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

VEPHand: View-Efficient Photometric Hand Performance Capture at Scale

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

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

A Controlled Study of Decoding-Time Truthfulness Methods on Instruction-Tuned LLMs

作者:

In this work, we introduce CHAIR (Classifier of Hallucination As ImproveR), a supervised framework for detecting hallucinations by analyzing internal logits from each layer of every token. Our method extracts a compact set of features such as maximum, minimum, mean, standard deviation, and slope-from the token logits across all layers, enabling effective hallucination detection without overfitting. Experiments on TruthfulQA and MMLU datasets demonstrate that CHAIR significantly improves detection accuracy, particularly in zero-shot scenarios, showcasing its robustness and generalizability. Beyond hallucination detection, CHAIR highlights the potential of using internal representations for designing advanced decoding strategies. By leveraging patterns in logits, we suggest that more sophisticated models and adaptive decoding methods could further reduce hallucinations and enhance text completion quality. CHAIR not only offers a practical solution for detecting hallucinations but also lays the groundwork for exploring richer representations in LLMs to improve their factuality and coherence.

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

PathRouter: Aligning Rewards with Retrieval Quality in Agentic Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Agentic GraphRAG trains language-model agents to iteratively retrieve and reason over graph-structured evidence, enabling more accurate and context-aware decision-making by efficiently navigating complex information networks. However, outcome-only reinforcement learning suffers from answer-path reward aliasing, where correct answers may come from shortcuts rather than useful evidence paths. It also exhibits search-update ambiguity, as scalar trajectory-level feedback does not indicate which retrieval actions to adjust. To mitigate these shortcomings, we present PathRouter, a path-aware training framework for agentic GraphRAG. PathRouter jointly evaluates each trajectory along answer correctness and evidence-path overlap, yielding four trajectory categories with differentiated GRPO advantage scaling that suppresses shortcut reinforcement while preserving evidence-seeking behavior. For evidence-poor trajectories, a frozen gold-evidence teacher provides token-level KL guidance on reasoning and search-query tokens, excluding answer tokens to avoid direct response imitation. Experiments on six QA benchmarks across three model sizes show that PathRouter consistently improves answer F1 and evidence-path overlap, achieving average F1 gains of 3.1 on 3B and 4.9 on 7B models compared to a strong baseline.

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

DCD: Domain-Oriented Design for Controlled Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2604.07590v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used to ground large language models in external knowledge sources. However, when applied to heterogeneous corpora and multi-step queries, Naive RAG pipelines often degrade in quality due to flat knowledge representations and the absence of explicit workflows. In this work, we introduce DCD (Domain-Collection-Document), a domain-oriented design to structure knowledge and control query processing in RAG systems without modifying the underlying language model. The proposed approach relies on a hierarchical decomposition of the information space and multi-stage routing based on structured model outputs, enabling progressive restriction of both retrieval and generation scopes. The architecture is complemented by smart chunking, hybrid retrieval, and integrated validation and generation guardrail mechanisms. We describe the DCD architecture and workflow and discuss evaluation results on synthetic evaluation dataset, highlighting their impact on robustness, factual accuracy, and answer relevance in applied RAG scenarios.

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

Through the PRISM: Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Video Diffusion Models

Evaluating video generation with clean, pixel-based reward models disconnects evaluation from the noisy diffusion process and incurs massive VAE decoding costs. In this paper, we challenge this paradigm by asking a fundamental question: Can a powerful video generator inherently discriminate preferences directly from noisy latents? To answer this, we introduce PRISM (Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Diffusion Models). PRISM employs a lightweight Query-based Aggregation head with a frozen video diffusion backbone to decode preference signals from noisy latents. Surprisingly, PRISM not only achieves SOTA preference accuracy but also unlocks strong noise-robustness, which enables early-stage Best-of-$N$ sampling. This allows for filtering suboptimal candidates at the very beginning of denoising, drastically reducing computation while boosting video quality. We also reveal a strong positive correlation between a backbone's generative performance and its inherent evaluative power, enabling self-improving video backbones.

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

Entity Labels Are Not Entity Signals: A Framework for Observable Relevance in Document Re-Ranking

Entity-aware document retrieval uses query-associated entities as ranking signals, assuming that semantically relevant entities are also useful retrieval signals. We show this assumption is insufficient- and explain why. Unlike terms, which are ground-truth observations, entity links are hypotheses produced by an imperfect linker: an entity can be topically central yet provide no discriminative signal if the linker fires indiscriminately across relevant and non-relevant documents. We formalize this as a distinction between Conceptual Entity Relevance (CER)- whether an entity is topically related to a query- and Observable Entity Relevance (OER)- whether its observed presence in a collection discriminates relevant from non-relevant documents. Across four collections and annotation sources including human entity judgments, CER and OER exhibit near-chance agreement ($\kappa \approx 0$), while OER operationalizations agree substantially ($\kappa \approx 0.5$), confirming CER as the systematic outlier. CER-based supervision selects topically plausible but weakly discriminative entities, pruning fewer than 4% of non-relevant documents on some collections. Aligning supervision with OER improves non-relevant pruning by up to 10x and open-world MAP by 0.051 over BM25. Our findings motivate a shift from conceptual to observable notions of entity relevance in entity-aware retrieval.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

PERRY: Policy Evaluation with Confidence Intervals using Auxiliary Data

arXiv:2507.20068v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods estimate the value of a new reinforcement learning (RL) policy prior to deployment. Recent advances have shown that leveraging auxiliary datasets, such as those synthesized by generative models, can improve the accuracy of OPE methods. Unfortunately, such auxiliary datasets may also be biased, and existing methods for using data augmentation within OPE lack principled uncertainty quantification. In high stakes domains like healthcare, reliable uncertainty estimates are important for ensuring safe and informed deployment of RL policies. In this work, we propose two methods to construct valid confidence intervals for OPE with data augmentation. The first provides a confidence interval over $V^{\pi}(s)$, the policy value conditioned on an initial state $s$. To do so we introduce a new conformal prediction method suitable for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with continuous state spaces, extending prior work to higher-dimensional settings. Second, we consider the more common task of estimating the average policy performance over all initial states, $V^{\pi}$; we introduce a method that draws on ideas from doubly robust estimation and prediction powered inference. Across simulators spanning inventory management, robotics, healthcare, and a real healthcare dataset from MIMIC-IV, we find that our methods can effectively leverage auxiliary data and consistently produce confidence intervals that cover the ground truth policy values, unlike previously proposed methods. Our work enables a future in which OPE can provide rigorous uncertainty estimates for high-stakes domains.

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

Contour-Constrained Deformable Registration with Parameter Characterization for Head and Neck Surgical Guidance

With 890,000 annual new cases globally, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma has one of the highest recurrence rates among solid malignancies. Although frozen section analysis is the standard of care for intraoperative margin assessment, accurately relocating detected positive margins on the resection bed remains challenging due to imprecise alignment between resected specimens and their resection bed, compounded by post-resection mucosal tissue shrinkage. We present a biomechanics-driven deformable registration framework that corrects post-resection tissue deformation to provide intraoperative guidance. Our approach registers 3D specimen meshes to intraoperative resection bed point clouds using a deformable registration approach based on regularized Kelvinlet basis functions. The registration matches surface point clouds, fiducial landmarks, and boundary contour constraints that directly penalize perpendicular distance-to-agreement between specimen and resection bed boundaries. Across nine specimens from skin, buccal mucosa, and tongue sites, the overall mean target registration error was $11.11 \pm 4.07$ mm using rigid registration, which decreased to $8.20 \pm 2.68$ mm (26.19\% reduction) using deformable registration without contour constraint. The proposed contour-constrained deformable registration further reduced the error to $5.62 \pm 2.28$ mm, a 49.41\% reduction relative to rigid registration. We observed the largest reduction in the most clinically challenging tongue specimens. We also performed a systematic two-stage parameter search to characterize the relative importance of surface alignment, fiducial correspondences, contour constraint, and strain energy regularization. This search revealed that contour weighting dominates registration accuracy for tissue types with large lateral deformation, while the algorithm operates over a broad range of parameter combinations.

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

LLM-Assisted Stance Detection in Scientific Discourse: A Test Case in Bayesian Cognitive Science

Qualitative coding is central to social science, but expert annotation is difficult to scale. LLMs offer a possible extension, yet require careful validation when the target construct is interpretive, theoretically loaded, and only indirectly expressed. We study this problem in a difficult case: detecting whether authors treat Bayesian models as descriptions of mental and neural mechanisms (realism) or as useful mathematical tools (instrumentalism). Our method combines a theory-driven codebook, expert-coded reference annotations, a diagnostic-gated prompt-optimization search yielding a shared zero-shot prompt for three frontier LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro Preview), and multi-rater reliability analysis. The final prompt achieved a held-out combined reliability score of 0.76 (harmonic mean of ICC = 0.79 and $\alpha$ = 0.74), with all diagnostics satisfied. Deployed on 6,858 quotes from 210 articles, the three LLMs reached substantial quote-level agreement (ICC = 0.80; $\alpha$ = 0.76; combined = 0.78) and near-perfect article-level rank stability ($r$ = 0.96-0.97 across rater pairs). The corpus was predominantly weakly realist, but article-level stances were rarely uniform: only 1.4% of articles used a single band, while 59.5% spanned four or more. Low-level perception/motor articles scored 8.8 Realism points higher than high-level cognition articles ($p < .001$, $d = 0.60$), quantifying a long-held qualitative intuition. We present this as an expert-led case study; the framework is intended to generalize to similar theoretically demanding tasks, not to all qualitative analysis.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Mapping molecular polariton transport via pump-probe microscopy

arXiv:2504.15501v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate how the transport properties of molecular polaritons in optical cavities can be extracted from a microscopic modeling of pump-probe spectroscopy. Our approach combines a mean-field treatment of the light-matter Hamiltonian with a perturbative expansion of both light and matter components, along with spatial coarse-graining. This approach extends semiclassical cavity spectroscopy to multimode light-matter interactions, providing full access to spatially resolved transient spectra. By simulating a microscopy experiment with counter-propagating pump and probe pulses, we compute the differential transmission and show how molecular dephasing and persistent dark exciton populations drive sub-group-velocity transport of the root-mean-square displacement. We analyze transport across the polariton dispersion, showing how velocity renormalization correlates with excitonic weight, consistent with experimental observations, and further its dependence on the rate of molecular dephasing. Our results highlight the need to consider measured spectroscopic observables when characterizing transport in polaritonic systems.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Toward Generalist Autonomous Research via Hypothesis-Tree Refinement

Scientific progress depends on a repeated loop of exploration, experimentation, and abstraction. Researchers test candidate directions, interpret the evidence, and carry the resulting lessons into later attempts. We study how an AI agent can run this loop autonomously over long horizons. We introduce Arbor, a general framework for autonomous research that combines a long-lived coordinator, short-lived executors, and Hypothesis Tree Refinement (HTR), a persistent tree that links hypotheses, artifacts, evidence, and distilled insights across time. The coordinator manages global research strategy over the tree, while executors implement and test individual hypotheses in isolated worktrees. As results return, Arbor updates the tree, propagates reusable lessons, refines the search frontier, and admits verified improvements. This design turns autonomous research from a sequence of local attempts into a cumulative process in which strategy, execution, and evidence are carried across time. We evaluate Arbor under Autonomous Optimization (AO), an operational setting where an agent improves an initial research artifact through iterative experimentation without step-level human supervision. Across six real research tasks in model training, harness engineering, and data synthesis, Arbor achieves the best held-out result on all six tasks, attaining more than 2.5x the average relative held-out gain of Codex and Claude Code under the same task interface and resource budget. On MLE-Bench Lite, Arbor reaches 86.36% Any Medal with GPT-5.5, the strongest result in our comparison.