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.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

‘Student Geng’ ignites research-integrity scandal in China after calling out senior academics<b> </b>

作者:

Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations. Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations.

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

Vision-Encoder Behavioral Fingerprints of Image-to-Image Generative Models: A Training-Paradigm-Driven Taxonomy of Six Commercial APIs

作者:

We study six production image-to-image AI systems (gpt-image-1, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, Flux Kontext, SDXL img2img, SD3 img2img, and Qwen Image Edit) under a content-adaptive sub-JND adversarial perturbation pipeline, scoring all outputs by frozen DINOv2 ViT-B/14 token distances against clean references. Across a 3,588-call corpus spanning COCO photographs, CelebA-HQ portraits, and AI-generated inputs, the six systems partition into two image-invariant behavioral bands on a 2D (patch_mean, ssim_clean) plane: edit-trained models (Flux Kontext, Qwen Edit, Gemini) cluster in a tight band, while T2I-base models adapted at sampling time (SDXL, SD3, gpt-image-1) cluster in a drift band.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Revealing trajectories of multi-modal voxel-level changes in neurodegenerative diseases using latent event mapping

Neurodegenerative diseases are driven by pathological mechanisms that can be indirectly measured in vivo using multi-modal neuroimaging. However, current computational methods that aim to reconstruct trajectories of voxel-level changes in the brain are either not computationally scalable or fully interpretable, limiting their ability to reveal associations between disease progression and underlying mechanisms. Here we introduce Latent Event Mapping (LEMING), a generative unsupervised modelling technique that learns a latent map of disease events along a common pseudo-timeline of events. We apply LEMING to amyloid PET and structural MRI data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative to reveal the first voxel-level trajectories of events in Alzheimer's disease. Notably, we show how LEMING can provide new insights into progression-dependent disease mechanisms. We find that acetylcholine receptor density is significantly positively associated with both late-stage amyloid and atrophy events, suggesting that either these receptors are targeted later in disease progression, or that amyloid does not play an active role. This has strong implications for therapeutics that target acetylcholine receptors, particularly for early-stage intervention strategies.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Conditional Diffusion Guidance under Hard Constraint: A Stochastic Analysis Approach

arXiv:2602.05533v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study conditional generation in diffusion models under hard constraints, where generated samples must satisfy prescribed events with probability one. Such constraints arise naturally in safety-critical applications and in rare-event simulation, where soft or reward-based guidance methods offer no guarantee of constraint satisfaction. Building on a probabilistic interpretation of diffusion models, we develop a principled conditional diffusion guidance framework based on Doob's h-transform, martingale representation and quadratic variation process. Specifically, the resulting guided dynamics augment a pretrained diffusion with an explicit drift correction involving the logarithmic gradient of a conditioning function, without modifying the pretrained score network. Leveraging martingale and quadratic-variation identities, we propose two novel off-policy learning algorithms based on a martingale loss and a martingale-covariation loss to estimate h and its gradient using only trajectories from the pretrained model. We provide non-asymptotic guarantees for the resulting conditional sampler in both total variation and Wasserstein distances, explicitly characterizing the impact of score approximation and guidance estimation errors. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in enforcing hard constraints and generating rare-event samples. The code of the numerical experiments can be found at https://github.com/ZhengyiGuo2002/CDG_Finance.

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

Models That Know How Evaluations Are Designed Score Safer

The validity of AI safety evaluations depends on models behaving consistently across controlled and deployment settings. Prior work has identified test-time contextual cues, such as hypothetical scenarios, as a source of verbalized evaluation awareness and subsequent behavioral shift. In this paper, we investigate a potential explanation of this phenomenon: evaluation meta-knowledge, defined as parametric knowledge about the structural traits that characterize evaluations. Similar to dataset contamination, where benchmark exposure leads to higher performance through memorization, we hypothesize that models trained on texts describing evaluation practices may implicitly learn to recognize and respond to evaluation-like contexts, for instance, through exposure to scientific articles or social media posts about AI benchmarking. To test this, we fine-tune models on synthetic documents describing evaluation traits such as verifiable structures or moral dilemmas. Evaluating this fine-tuned model on six safety benchmarks, we find that it is significantly safer than the base model and control model. This behavioral shift persists even when restricting the analysis to responses lacking explicit verbalization of evaluation awareness. Our results demonstrate that evaluation meta-knowledge may inflate safety benchmark performance, introducing a novel confounder that is independent of explicit memorization or verbalized evaluation awareness, thus, challenging to detect. These findings have important implications for the design and interpretation of AI safety evaluations. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/compass-group-tue/arxiv2026_evaluation_meta_knowledge.

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

S-GBT: Smooth Growth Bound Tensor for Certified Robustness Against Word Substitution Attacks in NLP

Despite recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP), models remain vulnerable to word substitution attacks. Most existing defenses focus on first order sensitivity and measure how much the output changes when the input is slightly perturbed. However, they ignore how this sensitivity evolves, which is described by curvature. When gradients vary sharply, models can still fail. This paper introduces the Smooth Growth Bound Tensor (S-GBT), a second order method that bounds the Hessian element-wise, for which we provide formal theoretical proofs on the resulting robustness bounds. A regularization term is added during training to minimize these bounds. This yields tighter certified robustness against word substitution attacks. The change in the output under word substitution is bounded by both a linear term and a quadratic term. S-GBT is derived for two architectures: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The method is integrated directly into the training objective. Its effectiveness is evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets. The results show that combining first and second order regularization improves certified robust accuracy by up to 23.4% compared to prior methods, while clean accuracy remains competitive. These findings indicate that controlling both the gradient and its variation is a promising direction for building more robust models.

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

CADO: From Imitation to Cost Minimization for Heatmap-based Solvers in Combinatorial Optimization

arXiv:2602.08210v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heatmap-based solvers have emerged as a promising paradigm for Combinatorial Optimization (CO). However, we argue that the dominant Supervised Learning (SL) training paradigm suffers from a fundamental objective mismatch: minimizing imitation loss (e.g., cross-entropy) does not guarantee solution cost minimization. We dissect this mismatch into two deficiencies: Decoder-Blindness (being oblivious to the non-differentiable decoding process) and Cost-Blindness (prioritizing structural imitation over solution quality). We empirically demonstrate that these intrinsic flaws impose a hard performance ceiling. To overcome this limitation, we propose CADO (Cost-Aware Diffusion models for Optimization), a streamlined Reinforcement Learning fine-tuning framework that formulates the diffusion denoising process as an MDP to directly optimize the post-decoded solution cost. We introduce Label-Centered Reward, which repurposes ground-truth labels as unbiased baselines rather than imitation targets, and Hybrid Fine-Tuning for parameter-efficient adaptation. CADO achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks, validating that objective alignment is essential for unlocking the full potential of heatmap-based solvers.

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

HyDRA: Hybrid Dynamic Routing Architecture for Heterogeneous LLM Pools

Production LLM deployments increasingly maintain heterogeneous model pools spanning order-of-magnitude cost differences. Existing routers make binary strong-vs-weak decisions and couple learned parameters to specific model identities, requiring retraining whenever the catalog changes. We present HyDRA (Hybrid Dynamic Routing Architecture), a framework that predicts fine-grained, multi-dimensional capability requirements per query and matches them against configuration-defined model profiles via shortfall matching. A ModernBERT encoder with K=4 independent sigmoid heads scores each query along reasoning, code generation, debugging, and tool use; a shortfall-matching algorithm then selects the cheapest model whose capabilities meet the predicted requirements. The deployed predictor runs at 86 ms median CPU inference latency in production, and is fully decoupled from the model catalog – adding or removing models requires only a configuration change, with zero retraining. On SWE-Bench Verified (5-model pool: GPT-5.4-mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.3 Codex, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4), HyDRA's tunable shortfall threshold spans three regimes: peak-quality exceeds the always-strong Claude Sonnet 4.6 baseline (75.4% vs. 74.2% resolution) at 12.9% cost savings; iso-quality matches Sonnet at 54.1% cost savings, a 6x improvement over our prior in-house binary router at 9.1%; aggressive pushes savings to 72.5% for a 3.2-point quality trade. Results generalize across LiveCodeBench, BigCodeBench, and tau-bench. HyDRA is deployed to all users in GitHub Copilot's VS Code Chat auto-mode and – to our knowledge for the first time in the LLM routing literature – demonstrates language-invariant routing across CJK, European, and other script families.

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

Biarchetype analysis for univariate functional data. An application to macroeconomic financial time series

arXiv:2606.15881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce biarchetype analysis for the first time in the context of univariate functional data. This unsupervised methodology extends archetype analysis by simultaneously identifying archetypal structures across both the cases (countries, in our application) and the temporal argument. Both cases and time points are expressed as mixtures of biarchetypes, yielding a concise and highly interpretable representation of complex functional observations. Although biarchetype analysis is not intended as a clustering technique, it offers superior interpretability compared with biclustering approaches, as it is based on extreme, representative patterns rather than average centroids, thereby enhancing human comprehension. We apply the proposed method to 10-year government bond yields of European countries over the period 2001-2025. The results identify three distinct time regimes (the pre-crisis period, the euro-area sovereign debt crisis, and the post-crisis period), and reveal Germany, Greece, and Hungary as country archetypes.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Attention Sinks in Diffusion Transformers: A Causal Analysis

Attention sinks – tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass – are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in text-to-image diffusion, dynamically identifying dominant attention recipients per timestep and suppressing them via paired, training-free interventions on the score and value paths. Across 553 GenEval prompts on Stable Diffusion~3 (with SDXL corroboration), removing these sinks does not degrade text-image alignment (CLIP-T) or preference proxies (ImageReward, HPS-v2) at $k{=}1$; only under stronger interventions ($k\!\geq\!10$) does HPS-v2 exhibit a metric-dependent boundary, while CLIP-T remains robust throughout. The perceptual shifts induced by suppression are nonetheless sink-specific – $\sim\!6\times$ larger than equal-budget random masking – revealing an empirical dissociation between trajectory-level perturbation and semantic alignment in diffusion transformers. \footnote{Code available at https://github.com/wfz666/ICML26-attention-sink.}

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

Where Does Social Reasoning Come From? Capability Provenance in Language Models

We use training-data attribution as an interpretable tool for capability discovery, mapping which regions of the pretraining corpus support social-reasoning versus STEM-reasoning in OLMo3-7B. Training-data attribution measures how strongly each training document influences a model's predictions on a benchmark, but document-level scores are too noisy to identify which corpus regions support which capabilities, and prior work has emphasized factual knowledge rather than reasoning. We compute gradient-based attribution (TrackStar via Bergson) over a working set drawn from the de-duplicated Dolma3 mix, aggregate influence across WebOrganizer's 24-format x 24-topic taxonomy (576 bins), and contrast benchmark pairs in a 2x2 design that varies domain (social vs. STEM) and capability type (reasoning vs. knowledge): SocialIQA and MMLU Social Sciences against ARC-Challenge and MMLU STEM. Social and STEM reasoning draw on qualitatively distinct corpus regions, and the contrast is sharper at the reasoning level than at the knowledge level. Targeted machine unlearning provides partial causal validation: forgetting high-attribution topic bins (e.g., Literature for SocialIQA) degrades the aligned benchmark more than within-bin random baselines, and we open-source all code, sampling manifests, the bin-level influence matrix, and unlearning checkpoints.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

MedSynth: Realistic, Synthetic Medical Dialogue-Note Pairs

Physicians spend significant time documenting clinical encounters, a burden that contributes to professional burnout. To address this, robust automation tools for medical documentation are crucial. We introduce MedSynth – a novel dataset of synthetic medical dialogues and notes designed to advance the Dialogue-to-Note (Dial-2-Note) and Note-to-Dialogue (Note-2-Dial) tasks. Informed by an extensive analysis of disease distributions, this dataset includes over 10,000 dialogue-note pairs covering over 2000 ICD-10 codes. We demonstrate that our dataset markedly enhances the performance of models in generating medical notes from dialogues, and dialogues from medical notes. The dataset provides a valuable resource in a field where open-access, privacy-compliant, and diverse training data are scarce. Code is available at https://github.com/ahmadrezarm/MedSynth/tree/main and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Ahmad0067/MedSynth.

13.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-09

Multi-stable oscillations in cortical networks with two classes of inhibition

by Arnab Dey Sarkar, Bard Ermentrout In the classical view of cortical rhythms, interactions between excitatory pyramidal neurons (E) and inhibitory parvalbumin-expressing interneurons (I) are sufficient to generate gamma- and beta-band oscillations. However, it is now well established that multiple inhibitory interneuron subtypes exist and that they play important roles in the generation and modulation of these rhythms. In this paper, we develop a spiking network model consisting of populations of E, I, and an additional interneuron type, somatostatin-expressing neurons (S), which receive excitation from the E cells and inhibit both the E and I populations. The S cells are further modulated by a third inhibitory subtype, vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) neurons, which receive inputs from other cortical areas. We reduce the spiking network to a system of nine differential equations that describe the mean membrane potential, firing rate, and synaptic conductance for each population. Using this reduced model, we identify a wide range of parameters that exhibit multiple coexisting rhythms. Employing tools from nonlinear dynamics, we then explore the roles of the two classes of inhibition, as well as VIP modulation, in shaping the properties of these rhythms.

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

Revisiting the Systematicity in Negation in the Era of In-Context Learning

Understanding the meaning of negated sentences remains one of the challenges for language models, even in the era of large language models (LLMs). We analyze systematicity regarding LLM understanding of negation from two perspectives: behavioral systematicity and representational systematicity. For behavioral systematicity, we confirm that through demonstrations and in-context learning, LLMs can recognize negation expressions and scope within sentences to some extent, but they fail to achieve perfect performance. In particular, the difficulty of the negation scope recognition for models varies depending on the output format. For representational systematicity, we analyze the extent to which function vectors can be robustly constructed from in-context examples for tasks that are essential to understanding negation. The experiments suggest that while function vectors can be composed for negation cue extraction tasks, extracting function vectors for recognizing scope is more challenging.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Neural network inverse design of nanophotonic scintillators

arXiv:2606.16309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scintillators are materials converting high-energy radiation into optical light, essential in a range of technologies such as medical imaging systems and security scanners. Scintillator development and optimization have remained limited by the complexity of their underlying physics, involving stochastic cascades of electron-electron, electron-phonon, and electron-photon interactions. Such processes are typically modeled by non-differentiable Monte Carlo simulations, limiting the applicability of machine learning for scintillator development. Here we present a physics-informed neural network that learns the scintillation cascade process from the incident high-energy particle to photon emission, substantially accelerating scintillator design and optimization. Combining this neural network with photonic simulations enables end-to-end differentiable optimization of the scintillator geometry. This allows us to optimize for arbitrary figures of merit, such as specific target emission patterns.. We demonstrate the concept and characterize it relative to previous approaches by inverse design of nanophotonic scintillators for X-ray imaging.

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

Beyond Scalars: Evaluating and Understanding LLM Reasoning via Geometric Progress and Stability

arXiv:2603.10384v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating LLM reliability via scalar probabilities often fails to capture the structural dynamics of reasoning. We introduce TRACED, a framework that assesses reasoning quality through theoretically grounded geometric kinematics. By decomposing reasoning traces into Progress (displacement) and Stability (curvature), we reveal a distinct topological divergence: correct reasoning manifests as high-progress, stable trajectories, whereas hallucinations are characterized by low-progress, unstable patterns (stalled displacement with high curvature fluctuations). Leveraging these signatures, our probabilistic framework achieves competitive performance and superior robustness across diverse benchmarks. Crucially, TRACED bridges geometry and cognition by mapping high curvature to ''Hesitation Loops'' and displacement to ''Certainty Accumulation'', offering a physical lens to decode the internal dynamics of machine thought.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-13

Projected population level impact and cost-effectiveness of clinic and community-based tuberculosis screening approaches

The South Africa National Department of Health have set ambitious targets to scale up TB testing, focusing primarily on clinic attendees. In the context of declining funding for TB care and prevention, the most cost-effective approaches for targeting testing should be identified. We developed a mathematical model of TB in South Africa, explicitly incorporating clinic attendance by sex and HIV/ART status. We simulated six screening approaches over 2026-2035 (individually and in combination): three clinic-based (symptom screening, intensified targeted universal TB testing [TUTT, symptom-agnostic sputum testing of clinic attendees in key risk groups], and intensified TUTT allowing saliva samples) and three targeted community-based (community radiographic screening, symptom screening, and universal Xpert Ultra testing), each implemented at a range of coverage levels. Model outputs were combined with a mechanistic cost function to estimate potential impact and cost-effectiveness from a societal perspective. The most cost-effective standalone approach was community radiographic screening at 10% annual population coverage, with an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of $421 per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) averted. 10/11 scenarios along the expansion path included community radiographic screening at progressively higher coverage, combined with a clinic-based approach. Combining complementary approaches to reach both groups at increased risk of TB (e.g. clinic-based screening) and groups with lower screening coverage (e.g. community-based screening) may increase cost-effectiveness of TB screening, compared to standalone approaches. When designing TB screening strategies, both population risk and existing screening coverage should be considered.

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

Rigidity of infinite exchangeable sequences with Gaussian marginals

arXiv:2606.18654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study infinite exchangeable sequences with Gaussian one-dimensional marginals. We formulate the conjecture that joint Gaussianity of a single pair of coordinates forces the entire sequence to be a Gaussian process. Although this conjecture remains open, we prove that joint Gaussianity of the first four coordinates is sufficient. We also establish the corresponding two-point criterion under the additional assumption that the directing measure is almost surely infinitely divisible.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

What Is the Optimal Timing and Frequency of Workload-Matched Postprandial Physical Activity Breaks? A Randomized Controlled Crossover Study of Cardiometabolic and Cognitive Responses During Sedentary Behavior

Purpose Postprandial sedentary behavior is associated with negative health effects and constitutes a large part of daily life in modern society. This study investigated how the timing of physical activity after eating influences glucose levels, cerebral and muscle oxygenation, cognitive performance, and well-being during subsequent sitting. Methods In a four-armed randomized crossover trial, healthy adults consumed four standardized meals separated by 48-hour washout periods. Each meal was followed by 2 hours of sitting combined, in random order, with one of four interventions: (1) sitting only, (2) 15 minutes of moderate intensity cycling immediately after eating, (3) 15 minutes of cycling 20 minutes after eating, or (4) three workload-matched five-minute cycling bouts during sitting. Interstitial glucose (continuous glucose monitoring), cerebral and muscle oxygenation (Functional near infrared spectroscopy), cognitive performance (Stroop test), heart rate, blood pressure, and subjective ratings were assessed every 30 minutes. Data were analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVA. Results Twenty participants (mean age 27.1{+/-}10.3 years, 12 females) completed the study. Cycling immediately after eating reduced mean glucose levels during postprandial sitting, while both 15-minute cycling bouts increased cerebral oxygenation. All active conditions enhanced muscle oxygenation. Heart rate and arousal increased with delayed cycling and active breaks. No effects were observed for blood pressure, cognitive performance, focus, or well-being. Conclusion A short bout of physical activity immediately after eating reduces postprandial hyperglycemia and improves brain oxygenation during sitting, whereas delayed activity and brief breaks increase physiological activation without cognitive or perceptual benefits.

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

Free Energy Heuristics: Fast-And-Frugal Cognition as Active Inference Under Uncertain Precision

作者:

Chain-of-thought (CoT) improves large language models' performance in math and symbolic reasoning. But on planning, contested ethics, and tasks where the model cannot check itself, more reasoning makes things worse. Both effects are documented; what has been missing is a principled account of which property decides the outcome. We argue it is meta-uncertainty: how unsure the model is about the reliability of its own evidence. When that uncertainty is high, extra reasoning stops adding signal and starts manufacturing false confidence. We prove that the policy minimizing expected free energy under uncertain precision stops integrating cues after a finite number of high-validity ones when the precision prior is heavy-tailed (Theorem 2.6.1), and under a Descending Dominance condition, is sample-wise identical to take-the-best (Theorem 2.7.4). Fast-and-frugal heuristics and active inference are, then, two descriptions of the same computation. The prediction is that on high-meta-uncertainty items, longer CoT should degrade accuracy. We score the regime per item (simulate-and-recover rho > 0.96), build FEH-79, a benchmark of Knightian frames with matched controls, and run a pre-registered study across seven models (five open-weight 3B-32B, two frontier), five CoT lengths, and 7,875 responses. The gate, fixed before any data, required a negative interaction with posterior probability above 0.95 and an accuracy drop of more than 6 points. It held. The high-regime drop is 17.3 points (95% CI [7.7, 25.5]); matched items with definite answers show no cost. The effect is regime-dependent: decisive in capable mid-to-large models, directional in the two frontier systems, absent-to-reversed in the weakest. The framework answers when CoT helps and unifies the Bayesian and fast-and-frugal traditions: less-is-more effects are evidence about the meta-uncertainty regime, not against Bayesian cognition.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

SEDULity: A Proof-of-Learning Framework for Distributed and Secure Blockchains with Efficient Useful Work

arXiv:2512.13666v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The security and decentralization of Proof-of-Work (PoW) have been well-tested in existing blockchain systems. However, its tremendous energy waste has raised concerns about sustainability. Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) aims to redirect the meaningless computation to meaningful tasks such as solving machine learning (ML) problems, giving rise to the branch of Proof-of-Learning (PoL). While previous studies have proposed various PoLs, they all, to some degree, suffer from security, decentralization, or efficiency issues. In this paper, we propose a PoL framework that trains ML models efficiently while maintaining blockchain security in a fully distributed manner. We name the framework SEDULity, which stands for a Secure, Efficient, Distributed, and Useful Learning-based blockchain system. Specifically, we encode the template block into the training process and design a useful function that is difficult to solve but relatively easy to verify, as a substitute for the PoW puzzle. We show that our framework is distributed, secure, and efficiently trains ML models. We further demonstrate that the proposed PoL framework can be extended to other types of useful work and design an incentive mechanism to incentivize task verification. We show theoretically that a rational miner is incentivized to train fully honestly with well-designed system parameters. Finally, we present simulation results to demonstrate the performance of our framework and validate our analysis.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Formation of clusters and coarsening in weakly interacting diffusions

arXiv:2510.17629v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies the clustering behavior of weakly interacting diffusions under the influence of sufficiently localized attractive interaction potentials on the one-dimensional torus. We describe how this clustering behavior is closely related to the presence of discontinuous phase transitions in the mean-field PDE. For local attractive interactions, we employ a new variant of the strict Riesz rearrangement inequality to prove that all global minimizers of the free energy are either uniform or single-cluster states, in the sense that they are symmetrically decreasing. We analyze different timescales for the particle system and the mean-field (McKean-Vlasov) PDE, arguing that while the particle system can exhibit coarsening by both coalescence and diffusive mass exchange between clusters, the clusters in the mean-field PDE are unable to move and coarsening occurs via the mass exchange of clusters. By introducing a new model for this mass exchange, we argue that the PDE exhibits dynamical metastability. We conclude by presenting careful numerical experiments that demonstrate the validity of our model.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

ClinHallu: A Benchmark for Diagnosing Stage-Wise Hallucinations in Medical MLLM Reasoning

Building trustworthy medical multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is critical for reliable clinical decision support. Existing medical hallucination benchmarks mainly focus on data collection, but often ignore where hallucinations originate within the reasoning process. We find that hallucination sources vary across samples: errors may arise from visual misrecognition, incorrect medical knowledge recall, or flawed reasoning integration. To enable source-level hallucination diagnosis, we introduce ClinHallu, a benchmark for stage-wise hallucination diagnosis in medical MLLM reasoning. ClinHallu contains 7,031 validated instances, where each instance is augmented with a structured reasoning trace decomposed into Visual Recognition, Knowledge Recall, and Reasoning Integration. We also use stage-replacement interventions to measure how correcting specific stages affects the final answer. Beyond evaluation, we show that trace-supervised fine-tuning reduces stage-wise hallucinations. ClinHallu provides a fine-grained hallucination testbed for diagnosing and mitigating reasoning failures in medical MLLMs. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/ClinHallu.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Disentangling Dynamical Systems: Causal Representation Learning Meets Local Sparse Attention

arXiv:2603.14483v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Parametric system identification methods estimate the parameters of explicitly defined physical systems from data. Yet, they remain constrained by the need to provide an explicit function space, typically through a predefined library of candidate functions chosen via available domain knowledge. In contrast, deep learning can demonstrably model systems of broad complexity with high fidelity, but black-box function approximation typically fails to yield explicit descriptive or disentangled representations revealing the structure of a system. We develop a novel identifiability theorem, leveraging causal representation learning, to uncover disentangled representations of system parameters without structural assumptions. We derive a graphical criterion specifying when system parameters can be uniquely disentangled from raw trajectory data, up to permutation and diffeomorphism. Crucially, our analysis demonstrates that global causal structures provide a lower bound on the disentanglement guarantees achievable when considering local state-dependent causal structures. We instantiate system parameter identification as a variational inference problem, leveraging a sparsity-regularised transformer to uncover state-dependent causal structures. We empirically validate our approach across four synthetic domains, demonstrating its ability to recover highly disentangled representations that baselines fail to recover. Corroborating our theoretical analysis, our results confirm that enforcing local causal structure is often necessary for full identifiability.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Data Standards for Humanoid Robotics: The Missing Infrastructure for Physical AI

arXiv:2606.19769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The scalability of humanoid robots will depend not only on models and hardware, but also on whether physical experience can accumulate across robots, tasks, organizations, and time. Drawing on the authors' work in developing ISO/WD 26264-1, Humanoid robot datasets – Part 1: General requirements, within ISO/TC 299/WG 16, this article argues that data standards are becoming foundational infrastructure for Physical AI. We develop three insights. First, humanoid robot data is embodied interaction data, not a collection of isolated digital samples; a useful dataset must preserve the relationship among robot body, action, task, scene, execution trace, and outcome. Second, its value depends on physical coherence: multimodal streams are reusable only when timing, coordinate frames, calibration, kinematics, units, and synchronization assumptions remain inspectable. Third, the main bottleneck is not only data scarcity, but non-cumulative data caused by high collection costs, data silos, and inconsistent evaluation. We argue that humanoid robot data standards address these bottlenecks by making embodied experience interpretable, shareable, traceable, and reusable. A general standard should provide horizontal infrastructure for lifecycle management, metadata, provenance, quality, versioning, and traceability, while capability-specific parts should define domain grammar for manipulation, locomotion, human-robot interaction, cognition, and future humanoid capabilities. As AI moves from screens into bodies, data standards must evolve from organizing digital information to structuring physical interaction.