Why we seek to fly: Books in brief
Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks. Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.
Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily
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Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks. Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.
arXiv:2606.08956v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientists have historically relied on mathematical models based on differential equations to relate system inputs – forces, fluxes, or heat sources – to outputs, such as displacement, velocity, concentration, and temperature. These models rely on deep domain knowledge to determine the form of the governing differential equation, which is then calibrated with data by solving an inverse problem. In recent years, the field of Scientific Machine Learning has introduced a variety of alternative modeling strategies for physical systems. A method called Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics learns the governing equation as a sparse linear combination of terms in a user-defined library. Neural Ordinary Differential Equations construct the governing equation by taking in the state and its derivatives at the input layer of a neural network. Entirely foregoing the modeling framework of differential equations, neural operators directly learn a non-linear mapping between the system inputs and outputs. From inverse problems to neural operators, all of these modeling strategies can be conceptualized as data-driven machinery to predict a system's response over a range of inputs. It is then natural to wonder how exactly these various strategies relate to each other, and whether they can be neatly taxonomized. Drawing from the philosophical literature on scientific models, we argue that many model types have a common structure, differing only in the assumed model class of the input-output relation they define. Connecting to philosophical ideas on mechanism, and arguing that data from physical systems arises from solutions to parsimonious differential equations, we propose that only certain models are capable of mechanism discovery, and thus generalization. Our analysis is intended to unite apparently disparate modeling strategies and provide insight into their appropriate use cases.
In film-substrate systems, the substrate role is often considered to be limited to providing static mechanical constraints. Dynamic film-substrate interactions when a structural change in the film modifies the substrate are generally disregarded. Using combined X-ray and electron microscopies, we observed that the electrically induced filament in a VO 2 film created strong asymmetric strain in the underlying Al 2 O 3 substate. This asymmetric substrate strain fed back into the film and defined the filament expansion direction, revealing the importance of film-substrate dynamic interactions in determining film functionality. Furthermore, the strain imprint propagated at least tens of microns deep into the substrate, exceeding the film thickness more than 200 times, potentially enabling substrate functionalization as an active mechanical coupling media in 3D-integrated microelectronics architectures.
arXiv:2606.17251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the scrambling of quantum information is central to many areas of quantum physics, including quantum thermalization, entanglement growth, and quantum information processing. Insights from these studies have, in turn, inspired the development of novel quantum protocols and algorithms. Recently, a bidirectional teleportation protocol was proposed to implement a digital SWAP operation between qubits by leveraging chaotic Hamiltonian evolution combined with measurement and post-selection. In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of two central quantities that characterize the protocol, the post-selection probability and the fidelity, taking into account possible errors in time-reversed dynamics. We show that these quantities can be expressed in terms of standard diagnostics in quantum dynamics, including the Loschmidt echo and its subsystem variant. The results unveil (1) the initial-state dependence of the fidelity and (2) the stability of the post-selection probability in integrable models. Our findings offer practical guidance for the implementation of the protocol on realistic quantum devices.
arXiv:2606.23858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A primary challenge in AI safety is the existence of adversarial examples – slightly distorted inputs that cause a neural network (NN) to misclassify. To mitigate this problem, recent research focuses on the computation of robustness certifications, which, for a given input, determine the largest distortion the input may receive without breaking the network's prediction. Robustness certifications can be interpreted as an axis-aligned hyper-rectangle (multi-dimensional intervals). Most existing approaches focus on maximizing the certification's volume, but recent intractability results prohibit the computation of volume-optimal certifications in reasonable time. We introduce the apothem measure and show how to compute apothem-optimal certifications in a linear number of calls to a NN verifier (oracle) w.r.t. the input domain's diameter. Moreover, we prove that we cannot have a volume-optimal, oracle-based algorithm, even if we discard the oracle costs. Also, we introduce dual certifications – an interval including all instances of a class – thus providing apothem-minimum upper bounds to a robustness certification. Further, we present the ParallelepipedoNN system, which we evaluate on the standard MNIST and Fashion MNIST benchmarks. A preliminary comparison with existing work on the same datasets reveals at least two-fold improvement w.r.t. the minimum edge length.
arXiv:2408.07534v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Loss-based notions of centre on nonlinear spaces range from the Fréchet mean and power means to the geometric median and, in a limiting sense, the Chebyshev centre. To use such summaries statistically, one first needs a law of large numbers that remains valid beyond smooth manifolds and beyond a fixed choice of loss. We study generalized Fréchet means on metric spaces with the Heine–Borel property, obtained by replacing squared distance with a convex loss under a mild exponential-growth condition. We prove existence and compactness of the population mean set, establish a sharp diameter bound, obtain almost-sure consistency of empirical $\phi$-means, and derive a uniform strong law over compact classes of losses. The analysis is driven by a deterministic argmin principle together with a Glivenko–Cantelli theorem for monotone classes. For isotropic densities on Riemannian symmetric spaces, we identify the population $\phi$-mean for every strictly increasing loss for which the objective is finite, including bounded robust losses. We also illustrate the framework on spheres and on the polyhedral space of ultrametric phylogenetic trees.
arXiv:2606.22080v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Low-noise parametric amplifiers are widely used as the first-stage amplifier in qubit readout chains. The performance of parametric amplifiers depends sensitively on the choice of the pump condition. We propose a strategy for determining the pump condition that is tailored for fast multiplexed readout. Choosing the amplifier pump to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement at the readout frequency of the limiting qubit–the qubit that requires the longest readout time to reach a target SNR–minimizes the total multiplexed readout time. We demonstrate our pump calibration strategy experimentally on a five-qubit multiplexed readout chain with a traveling-wave parametric amplifier. Using our strategy, we reduce the multiplexed readout time by 320 ns compared to optimizing the average SNR improvement on all qubits, without degrading the target SNR for any qubit.
Recent advances in mobile agents are dominated by the GUI paradigm, in which agents perceive UI information and emit screen interactions. However, mobile platforms also expose a command-line interface (CLI) that provides direct access to device services and data. We argue CLI deserves first-class consideration alongside GUI. We evaluate three coding agents (Claude Code, Terminus-2, mini-swe-agent) across four model APIs on AndroidWorld and MobileWorld without any mobile-specific post-training, comparing against three reproducible GUI baselines (GUI-Owl-1.5-32B, MAI-UI, Qwen3-VL-32B). Claude Code (Opus 4.7) reaches 71.8\% and 51.9\%, outperforming every reproducible GUI baseline (69.3/68.1/57.8\% on AndroidWorld; 43.2/26.3/13.3\% on MobileWorld), while every other CLI configuration remains competitive. To establish the paradigm's ceiling, we provide oracle CLI solutions that reach 88.8\% on AndroidWorld (103/116 tasks CLI-solvable) and 86.3\% on MobileWorld (101/117 tasks CLI-solvable), indicating substantial room for future improvement. To cover everyday user intents beyond the GUI scope, we introduce the CLI-Advantage Task Suite, comprising 45 templates across five categories: bulk operations, multi-condition filtering, aggregation, cross-app workflows, and hidden device state. Every CLI agent outperforms every GUI baseline in all five categories, with substantially fewer steps per task (10.7 vs.\ 18.6). To support future research on mobile CLI agents, we will open-source agent implementations, oracle solutions, the CLI-Advantage suite, and evaluation infrastructure.
Four antibiotic compounds produced in Streptomyces bacteria attack multiple parts of an essential metabolic pathway. Four antibiotic compounds produced in Streptomyces bacteria attack multiple parts of an essential metabolic pathway.
End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on multi-city datasets using supervised ImageNet-pretrained backbones, yet their ability to generalize to unseen cities remains largely unexamined. When training and evaluation data are geographically mixed, models may implicitly rely on city-specific cues, masking failure modes that would occur under real-world domain shifts when generalizing to new locations. In this work, we formulate zero-shot cross-city transfer as a controlled representation-level stress test for end-to-end autonomous driving and ask how visual pretraining affects transfer behavior under geographic domain shift. We conduct a comprehensive study by integrating self-supervised backbones I-JEPA, DINOv2, and MAE into planning frameworks. We evaluate performance under strict geographic splits on nuScenes in the open-loop setting and on NAVSIM in the closed-loop evaluation protocol. Our experiments reveal a substantial generalization gap when transferring models across cities with different road topologies, traffic conventions, and visual environments. In open-loop evaluation, a supervised backbone exhibits severe degradation when transferring between cities, yet some domain-specific self-supervised methods can substantially reduce both displacement and collision degradation. In closed-loop evaluation, self-supervised pretraining improves average out-of-distribution PDMS in several single-city training settings. Our results provide empirical evidence that representation learning influences the robustness of cross-city planning and motivate zero-shot geographic transfer as an important stress test for evaluating end-to-end autonomous driving systems.
arXiv:2408.17221v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider function spaces defined by self-attention networks without normalization, and theoretically analyze their geometry. Since these networks are polynomial, we rely on tools from algebraic geometry. In particular, we study the identifiability of deep attention by providing a description of the generic fibers of the parametrization for an arbitrary number of layers and, as a consequence, compute the dimension of the function space. Additionally, for a single-layer model, we characterize the singular and boundary points. Finally, we formulate a conjectural extension of our results to normalized self-attention networks, prove it for a single layer, and numerically verify it in the deep case.
Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to continually learn new categories without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Vision-language models such as CLIP offer strong transferable representations via multi-modal supervision, making them promising for CIL. However, applying CLIP to CIL poses two major challenges: (1) adapting to downstream tasks often requires additional learnable modules, increasing model complexity and susceptibility to forgetting; and (2) while multi-modal representations offer complementary strengths, existing methods have yet to fully realize their potential in effectively integrating visual and textual modalities. To address these issues, we propose BOFA (Bridge-layer Orthogonal Fusion for Adaptation), a novel framework for CIL. BOFA confines all model adaptation exclusively to CLIP's existing cross-modal bridge-layer, thereby adding no extra parameters or inference cost. To prevent forgetting within this layer, it leverages Orthogonal Low-Rank Fusion, a mechanism that constrains parameter updates to a low-rank ``safe subspace" mathematically constructed to be orthogonal to past task features. This ensures stable knowledge accumulation without data replay. Furthermore, BOFA employs a cross-modal hybrid prototype that synergizes stable textual prototypes with visual counterparts derived from our stably adapted bridge-layer, enhancing classification performance. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that BOFA achieves superior accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods.
arXiv:2606.18367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard benchmarks evaluate time series foundation models (TSFMs) using aggregate metrics, but these can mask severe failures in critical operating regimes. We introduce regime-stratified evaluation and apply it to three TSFMs on two standard traffic speed benchmarks. Traffic exhibits abrupt regime switching between free-flow and congested states, producing bimodal speed distributions during transitions. When we stratify by traffic regime, both accuracy and prediction-interval coverage degrade sharply during transitions: transition-regime MAE reaches 11 mph (versus 3 mph overall), and empirical coverage of 90% prediction intervals drops as low as 55%. These failures are invisible in aggregate metrics because free-flow observations dominate the sample. A simple historical conditional baseline (sampling from per-sensor training distributions) achieves better transition coverage than any TSFM, but has far worse overall accuracy. We propose bimodal mixture augmentation (BMA), a post-hoc method that combines TSFM forecasts with historical distributional knowledge, approaching the historical baseline's transition coverage while preserving the TSFM's accuracy. Our results suggest that TSFM benchmarks should incorporate regime-aware evaluation to surface failures that aggregate metrics hide.
Despite the success of end-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems, maintaining strict context adherence in multi-round conversations remains a challenge. While prior works attribute these failures to models forgetting dialogue history, we highlight an equally critical but overlooked bottleneck: a gap between latent context awareness and active adherence. Although models internally recognize relevant past utterances, strong parametric priors often overshadow these signals during decoding. To bridge this gap, we propose an audio-adapted Context-Aware Decoding (CAD) approach. By leveraging internal attention mechanisms to isolate key historical rounds, our approach contrasts output distributions with and without this key context during inference, directly amplifying multimodal contextual signals. Evaluations on the Audio MultiChallenge benchmark demonstrate significant improvements in Semantic Memory and Self Coherence subtasks, successfully enforcing strict, context-faithful adherence.
arXiv:2606.14690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a max-risk objective for active learning in a multi-group mean estimation $d$-armed bandits: a learner adaptively allocates a budget of $T$ samples across $d$ groups to minimize the worst-case uncertainty index $\max_{k\in[d]}\sigma_k^2/n_k$, where $\sigma_k$ is the standard deviation of the distribution of arm $d$, and $n_k$ is the number of times arm $d$ is sampled. We develop a local minimax framework and prove the first general lower bound for this objective, valid for any finite-variance hypothesis class. The bound separates difficulty into three orthogonal factors: a budget term, a heteroscedasticity index measuring how unevenly the uncertainty is spread across arms, and a model-dependent complexity measure, the Variance Local Curvature ($\mathrm{VLC}$), which captures how much information a local change of variance creates inside the hypothesis class. For smooth classes, the $\mathrm{VLC}$ is a reparametrization of a variance–Fisher information, with closed-form values for common families. Benchmarking against the strongest available upper bound shows near-optimality up to logarithmic factors in broad regimes, and pinpoints a systematic gap in highly heterogeneous instances. Our proof introduces two key ingredients: a loss-induced $\ell_1$ geometry on the decision space, and a representation-based instance generator that reduces hard-instance construction to an explicit random matrix calculation.
Language-specific tokenizers improve tokenization quality and the downstream performance of models on those languages. However, using such a tokenizer comes at a cost: either a new model must be trained from scratch, or the vocabulary of an existing pretrained model must be adapted. We propose Language-adaptive Maximum a Posteriori (LangMAP) Tokenization, a tokenization scheme that extends the UnigramLM algorithm to the multilingual setting, producing language-specific tokenization from a single shared vocabulary. Notably, LangMAP can be used when training a multilingual language model from scratch or to adapt a pretrained model's tokenizer to individual languages without changing its vocabulary. While language labels are required at training time, a key feature of the algorithm is that it then performs language-specific tokenization at inference without knowledge of the input's language. Across 14 open-source tokenizers, 9 natural languages, and 9 programming languages, LangMAP improves morphological boundary alignment and, for all coding languages tested, alignment with abstract syntax tree (AST) leaf boundaries. In fine-tuning experiments, results are mixed: LangMAP improves target-language grammatical acceptability (MultiBLiMP) on the languages tested; its benefits are less consistent on knowledge-related tasks (Global-PIQA, Belebele).
AI systems based on artificial neural networks are being developed with aspirations of pushing the boundary of human mathematical knowledge. A key question for these systems is how much they can reach beyond their training data. Mathematical discovery requires a strong form of out of distribution generalization; the ability to hypothesize genuinely new - and potentially logically more powerful - mathematical structures. It has been hypothesized that language abilities support such generalizations in human cognition. In this work, we use simple arithmetic as a case study for examining how modern AI models could expand their mathematical horizons, evaluating whether these models can independently discover the concept of "zero". We show that We show that (1) language models of a GPT-2 size are unable to perform this generalization at test time regardless of language pretraining, but (2) models can improve substantially after training on tens or hundreds of examples of zero. Additionally, we find that language pretraining reduces the number of required examples by approximately $50\%$, showing that language abilities can scaffold mathematical discovery in neural models.
arXiv:2606.16974v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The reproducibility crisis has directed the AI research community toward improving documentation practices. Several studies have identified methodological issues, and in response, the most impactful venues in the field have introduced reproducibility checklists. We seek to understand whether documentation practices have changed over time by assessing all published papers at five leading AI conferences over the past decade. Seven reproducibility variables were identified, quality-assured and used to analyse 56 800 publications. Our analysis reveals that in the period 2014 to 2024, documentation practices have improved; papers sharing both code and data increased nearly sixfold, from 11% to 64% Building on empirical reproducibility rates from a prior study, we estimate - inferred from documentation practices, not direct testing - that reproducibility increased from 28% in 2014 to 64% in 2024. Improvements in documentation practices predate the introduction of reproducibility checklists, suggesting these changes reflect a broader movement toward open science rather than a direct response to formal requirements.
Abstractive text summarization is the technique of generating a short and concise summary comprising the salient ideas of a source text without making a subset of the salient sentences from the source text. The introduction of transformer models such as BART, T5, and PEGASUS has made this sort of summarization process more efficient and accurate. The objective of this paper is to fine-tune PEGASUS on the XL-Sum English corpus to achieve a better performance compared to the baseline mT5 model. The performance of the generated summaries from the fine-tuned model is evaluated using the ROUGE metric, which basically compares the auto-generated summaries with human-created summaries. To the best of our knowledge, the results from our fine-tuned PEGASUS model give a state-of-the-art performance on the XL-Sum English Corpus. To quantify the improvement, there is a 4.04% improvement in the ROUGE-1 score, a 15.25% increase in the ROUGE-2 score, and a 3.39% improvement in the ROUGE-L score from the baseline model.
arXiv:2606.24803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: These notes provide an introduction to tensor-network methods in quantum many-body physics, with an emphasis on matrix-product states (MPS). They develop the basic tensor-network language, including graphical notation, virtual indices, bond dimensions, gauge freedom, canonical forms, QR and singular-value decompositions, and the role of entanglement in controlling the efficiency of the representation. The main MPS algorithms are then introduced, including contractions, correlation functions, matrix-product operators, DMRG, and time-evolution methods. The notes also briefly discuss projected entangled-pair states (PEPS) as a higher-dimensional generalization of MPS, together with the basic ideas behind approximate PEPS contraction. Finally, tensor-network representations of mixed states, quantum channels, and Lindblad dynamics are presented, with applications to thermal states and open quantum systems. The presentation is accompanied by short Julia code examples based on ITensor, ITensorMPS, and TensorMixedStates. These notes were written for the 9th Les Houches Summer School on Computational Physics: Open Quantum Systems, held in June 2026.
arXiv:2606.20231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can intelligence be measured? We propose that intelligence can be defined as the lawful amplification of rare but valid futures: a system increases the probability of outcomes that would be unlikely under passive dynamics but remain admissible under the constraints of the domain. We start with the premise that an intelligent system must model the world and its own place within it. Because the system is part of the world it models, this leads naturally to recursive self-simulation: the system represents futures in which its own actions are part of the trajectory. Our central results give a necessity statement and a conditional near-sufficiency statement connecting this architecture to a precise thermodynamic measure of lawful amplification of rare-valid futures: high rare-valid lift is impossible unless the internal simulation identifies rare-valid futures with high fidelity; conversely, when rare-valid fidelity is high and the simulation contains an effective policy, the achievable lift approaches the actuation-limited optimum. Thus recursive self-simulation is not merely a plausible feature of intelligence but, under the stated assumptions, is necessary and nearly sufficient for high thermodynamic intelligence. The resulting framework makes intelligence measurable on a universal scale, from passive matter and feedback controllers, large language models, and humans as text generators to Maxwell-demon-like information engines.
arXiv:2505.16057v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-Generated (AIG) content has become increasingly widespread by recent advances in generative models and the easy-to-use tools that have significantly lowered the technical barriers for producing highly realistic audio, images, and videos through simple natural language prompts. In response, platforms are adopting provable provenance with platforms recommending AIG to be self-disclosed and signaled to users. However, these indicators may be often missed, especially when they rely solely on visual cues and make them ineffective to users with different sensory abilities. To address the gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews (N=28) with 15 sighted and 13 BLV participants to examine their interaction with AIG content through self-disclosed AI indicators. Our findings reveal diverse mental models and practices, highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of content-based (e.g., title, description) and menu-aided (e.g., AI labels) indicators. While sighted participants leveraged visual and audio cues, BLV participants primarily relied on audio and existing assistive tools, limiting their ability to identify AIG. Across both groups, they frequently overlooked menu-aided indicators deployed by platforms and rather interacted with content-based indicators such as title and comments. We uncovered usability challenges stemming from inconsistent indicator placement, unclear metadata, and cognitive overload. These issues were especially critical for BLV individuals due to the insufficient accessibility of interface elements. We provide practical recommendations and design implications for future AIG indicators across several dimensions.
arXiv:2604.22167v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language models are increasingly capable and are being rapidly deployed on a population-level scale. As a result, the safety of these models is increasingly high-stakes. Fortunately, advances in alignment have significantly reduced the likelihood of harmful model outputs. However, when models are queried billions of times in a day, even rare worst-case behaviors will occur. Current safety evaluations focus on capturing the distribution of inputs that yield harmful outputs. These evaluations disregard the probabilistic nature of models and their tail output behavior. To measure this tail risk, we propose a method to efficiently estimate the probability of harmful outputs for any input query. Instead of naive brute-force sampling from the target model, where harmful outputs could be rare, we operationalize importance sampling by creating unsafe versions of the target model. These unsafe versions enable sample-efficient estimation by making harmful outputs more probable. On benchmarks measuring misuse and misalignment, these estimates match brute-force Monte Carlo estimates using 10-20x fewer samples. For example, we can estimate probability of harmful outputs on the order of 10^-4 with just 500 samples. Additionally, we find that these harmfulness estimates can reveal the sensitivity of models to perturbations in model input and predict deployment risks. Our work demonstrates that accurate rare-event estimation is both critical and feasible for safety evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/rangell/LMTailRisk
We study multi-sensor fusion for 3D semantic segmentation that is important to scene understanding for many applications, such as autonomous driving and robotics. Existing fusion-based methods, however, may not achieve promising performance due to the vast difference between the two modalities. In this work, we investigate a collaborative fusion scheme called perception-aware multi-sensor fusion (PMF) to effectively exploit perceptual information from two modalities, namely, appearance information from RGB images and spatio-depth information from point clouds. To this end, we project point clouds to the camera coordinate using perspective projection, and process both inputs from LiDAR and cameras in 2D space while preventing the information loss of RGB images. Then, we propose a two-stream network to extract features from the two modalities, separately. The extracted features are fused by effective residual-based fusion modules. Moreover, we introduce additional perception-aware losses to measure the perceptual difference between the two modalities. Last, we propose an improved version of PMF, i.e., EPMF, which is more efficient and effective by optimizing data pre-processing and network architecture under perspective projection. Specifically, we propose cross-modal alignment and cropping to obtain tight inputs and reduce unnecessary computational costs. We then explore more efficient contextual modules under perspective projection and fuse the LiDAR features into the camera stream to boost the performance of the two-stream network. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets show the superiority of our method. For example, on nuScenes test set, our EPMF outperforms the state-of-the-art method, i.e., RangeFormer, by 0.9% in mIoU. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ICEORY/PMF.
arXiv:2606.13591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Confidence is used for reliability, oversight, and a range of downstream decision tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet no existing method produces or evaluates a confidence for the output of a multiagent system. Prior work uses confidence within multiagent debate (MAD) to weight messages, trigger debate, or calibrate individual agents, but it never aggregates these into a single confidence for the system itself. We introduce three protocols that produce a final answer along with a single aggregated confidence by first transforming raw confidence signals to make them comparable across models, then combining them via soft voting or a probability fusion we call Bayesian fusion. This aggregated confidence is substantially more discriminative (AUARC) than that of the best single agent or the standard debate baselines, while correctness (F1-score) stays stable and recovers the losses MAD incurs on more ambiguous tasks. Analyzing two estimators, sequence probability and self-report, alongside parametric and non-parametric calibrators, we find that calibration improves F1 for both estimators while AUARC is less reliant on it. We evaluate six homogeneous and heterogeneous debating pairs per benchmark, across five benchmarks and four task types, spanning a range of model capabilities and sizes.