Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

TextHOI-3D: Text-to-3D Hand-Object Interaction via Discrete Multi-View Generation and Joint Mesh Optimization

Text-conditioned 3D generation has progressed rapidly for images and isolated objects, but producing a hand-object mesh remains challenging: the output must preserve language semantics, cross-view consistency, object geometry, articulated hand shape, and physically plausible contact. We present TextHOI-3D, a staged framework that uses generated multi-view observations as an explicit interface between text-conditioned visual generation and geometry-aware hand-object recovery. TextHOI-3D learns a compact VQ token space for fixed-camera hand-object observations, predicts multi-view visual tokens from text with a CLIP-conditioned visual autoregressive model, and recovers a unified hand-object mesh through prior initialization, multi-view joint optimization, and anti-penetration refinement. The design separates semantic generation from geometric recovery while keeping both stages connected by a discrete multi-view representation. On HO3D-derived evaluations, the multi-view setting reduces object CD from 17.26 mm to 4.92 mm and penetration volume from 5.3721 cm^3 to 0.2193 cm^3 compared with a single-view counterpart, while improving hand errors and surface F-scores. These results support multi-view visual tokens as an effective intermediate representation for text-driven 3D hand-object mesh creation.

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

Traits Run Deeper: Trait-Specific Asymmetric Fusion for Personality Assessment

Personality assessment aims to infer stable personality traits from dynamic behaviors across language, voice, and facial cues. Since different personality dimensions are revealed through distinct behavioral perspectives, modeling trait-specific evidence is challenging. However, most existing approaches adopt a uniform multimodal fusion strategy across all dimensions, assuming identical modality contributions. This overlooks trait-specific modality preferences and introduces cross-modal interference. To address this issue, we propose a novel personality assessment framework called Traits Run Deeper, which consists of three components. Specifically, the Multimodal Foundation Representation (MFR) module constructs personality-oriented multimodal inputs and leverages psychology-informed semantic templates as anchors, enabling foundation models to capture trait-relevant information. Building upon MFR, the Trait-Specific Modality Fusion (TSMF) module acts as an asymmetric fusion mechanism, allowing each dimension to selectively exploit different modality pathways from modality-specific modeling to complementary fusion. Thus, TSMF captures heterogeneous modality preferences while reducing cross-modal contamination. Furthermore, the Distribution-Calibrated Personality Regression (DCPR) module mitigates label imbalance and central tendency bias through target distribution calibration, improving robustness and stability. Experimental results on the AVI Challenge 2026 validation set demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, reducing mean squared error (MSE) by approximately 25% compared with the baseline. Consistent improvements are observed on the official test set, where our method achieves the best performance and ranks first in the Personality Assessment Track. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/MSA-LMC/AVI2026.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Towards Conversational AI for Disease Management

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue1, their capabilities for effective management reasoning—including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription—remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE)1−3 through a new LLM-based agentic system optimized for multi-visit clinical management and dialogue. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini’s long-context capabilities4, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialists and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. Though AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE’s strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Indefinite Quantum Causality

arXiv:2606.19438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, operational approaches to quantum foundations have been developed as a means of understanding the core principles and distinctive features of quantum theory. Such approaches typically view physical processes as sequences of operations, with earlier operations serving as causes of later effects. However, a growing literature is emerging on the possibility of relaxing this assumption and allowing for quantum indefiniteness in the causal order. This development stems from a variety of motivations, both fundamental and applied, including exploring the role of causality in quantum theory, the interplay between quantum theory and general relativity, and higher-order quantum computing. A prominent offshoot of this development is the emergence of indefinite causal order as a feasible resource for quantum information processing. This review provides an overview of the current state of the art in the field, covering the methodology underlying indefinite quantum causality within the so-called "process matrix formalism", outlining key results and experimental implementations, and discussing recent advances.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

When Lower Privileges Suffice: Investigating Over-Privileged Tool Selection in LLM Agents

As LLM agents increasingly select tools autonomously, their choices among tools with different privileges become safety-relevant. However, prior tool-selection studies focus on safety-agnostic metadata preferences, leaving privilege-sensitive choices underexplored. To address this gap, we study over-privileged tool selection, in which an agent selects or escalates to a higher-privilege tool despite a sufficient lower-privilege alternative. We introduce ToolPrivBench to evaluate whether agents choose higher-privilege tools despite sufficient lower-privilege alternatives, measuring both initial selection and escalation after transient tool failures. Across eight domains and five recurring risk patterns, we find that over-privileged tool selection is common among mainstream LLM agents and is further amplified by transient failures. We further find that general safety alignment does not reliably transfer to least-privilege tool choice, while prompt-level controls provide only limited mitigation under transient failures. We therefore introduce a privilege-aware post-training defense that teaches agents to prefer sufficient lower-privilege tools and escalate only when necessary. Our mitigation experiments show that this defense substantially reduces unnecessary high-privilege tool use while preserving general capabilities.

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

Naive Visual Memory is Not Enough: A Failure-Mode Study of GUI Agents

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents are increasingly used to automate complex computer tasks across applications, websites, and operating systems. To improve their reliability, recent work has introduced experiential memory, where agents retrieve prior trajectories to guide decision-making in similar states. More recent approaches further extend this idea to visual memory by storing and retrieving screenshots from past interactions, providing agents with richer contextual information than text-only memories. However, the effect of visual memory in GUI agents remains insufficiently understood: it is unclear which failures visual memory mitigates, or which failures it exacerbates. To systematically analyze the effect of visual memory, we introduce a taxonomy of four GUI agent failures (i.e., cognitive failure, visual state misunderstanding, hidden operation blindness, and grounding error) that map to distinct stages of the perception-reasoning-action pipeline. We find that prepending full-image memory has a divergent effect on the failure distribution: it reduces state-level failures but worsens action-level ones, and increases hidden operation blindness and grounding error. Motivated by this finding, we propose Action-Grounded Visual Memory (AGMem), an action-grounded memory framework for GUI agents. The core idea of AGMem is to store image crops that capture the local GUI region closely related to a successful action or a recovery, rather than storing full screenshots. Experiments on OSWorld show that AGMem improves task success rates by 33.3 % over full-image memory. These results demonstrate that AGMem is an effective representation for visual memory in GUI agents.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Fourier Features Let Agents Learn High Precision Policies with Imitation Learning

arXiv:2606.12334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-precision robotic manipulation requires fine-grained spatial reasoning that is often difficult to achieve with RGB-only policies due to depth ambiguity and perspective scale issues. Policies that leverage 3D information directly, such as those based on point clouds, offer a stronger geometric prior over purely image-based ones, yet their performance remains highly task-dependent. We hypothesize that this discrepancy may be due to the spectral bias of neural networks towards learning low frequency functions, which especially affects architectures conditioned on slow-moving Cartesian features. We thus propose to map point clouds from Cartesian space into high-dimensional Fourier space, effectively equipping the point cloud encoder with direct access to high-frequency features. We experimentally validate the use of Fourier features on challenging manipulation tasks from the RoboCasa and ManiSkill3 benchmarks and on a real robot setup. Despite their simplicity, we find that Fourier features provide significant benefits across diverse encoder architectures and benchmarks and are robust across hyperparameters. Our results indicate that Fourier features let policies leverage geometric details more effectively than Cartesian features, showing their potential as a general-purpose tool for point cloud-based imitation learning. We provide source code and videos on our project page: https://fourier-il.github.io/fourier-il

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines: TRUST

arXiv:2606.18832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Counterfactual explanations are widely used to provide algorithmic recourse in high-stakes decision-making systems. Most existing methods seek the smallest change to an input that flips a model's decision. However, decision-makers often rely not only on predicted labels but also on confidence thresholds and risk margins. Counterfactuals that barely cross a decision boundary can be fragile and unstable under noise or model variation. In this paper, we propose Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines (TRUST), a framework in which users explicitly specify the desired prediction confidence for recourse. Rather than generating counterfactuals and evaluating confidence afterward, TRUST directly searches for minimal changes that satisfy a user-defined confidence target, enabling comparison of recourse options in terms of cost, confidence, and robustness. We instantiate TRUST using a Probabilistic Tsetlin Machine (PTM) combined with Bayesian optimization. The probabilistic clause-based structure of PTM links prediction confidence to the stability of decision rules. We show that counterfactuals satisfying the same rules can still differ substantially in reliability depending on how securely they satisfy those rules, revealing whether decisions are supported by robust or fragile clause activations. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that target-confidence counterfactuals produce more robust and interpretable recourse than conventional boundary-based approaches. Across multiple benchmarks, TRUST achieves perfect robustness while maintaining low recourse cost, including an L2 distance of 0.10 on the Haberman dataset at 0.92 confidence. By explicitly controlling confidence and exposing rule-level stability, TRUST provides actionable recourse for high-stakes decision support.

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

Breaking the Solver Bottleneck: Training Task Generators at the Learnable Frontier

The limiting resource for training agents via reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly frontier task supply: valid, solvable tasks just difficult enough to train the current model. As reasoning and agentic models improve, fixed task distributions saturate, while naive synthetic generation yields tasks that are trivial, impossible, or ill-posed. Training a task generator with RL to optimize validity and learnability can address this bottleneck, but direct optimization requires repeated solver rollouts per candidate. For software-engineering (SWE) tasks, a single rollout can take tens of minutes; solver-in-the-loop generator training is intractable. We introduce PROPEL, a solver-amortized framework for training task generators at the targeted solve rate. PROPEL trains a lightweight activation probe on a one-time labeled corpus of generated tasks and solver outcomes. The probe predicts target-solver pass rate from a frozen generator reference model and serves as a proxy for solve rate during generator optimization, reducing generator evaluation to a single forward pass. Across math, code, and software-engineering at multiple model scales, PROPEL shifts generation toward the targeted solve rate: for coding, tasks generated at the learnable frontier increase from $10.1\% \rightarrow 20.0\%$ for a Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct solver and from $5.3\% \rightarrow 12.6\%$ for a Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct solver. For SWE, PROPEL increases the share of generations at the targeted solve rate from $9.8\% \rightarrow 19.6\%$ for Qwen3.5-27B on repositories not seen during training of probe and generator.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

BrainFusionNet: a deep learning and XAI model to understand local, global, and sequential features of MRI images for improved brain tumour detection

The noise of Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI poses challenges for Deep Learning DL when tumor boundaries are obscured tumor location and appearance are complex Therefore we develop BrainFusionNet that combines Convolutional Neural Networks CNNs Vision Transformers ViT and Gated Recurrent Units GRUs to extract spatial contextual and sequential features from MRI images for improved brain tumor classification Furthermore explainable AI such as SHAP LIME and GradCAM are integrated to visualise and highlight image regions that contribute to BrainFusionNets decisionmaking process The proposed BrainFusionNet model is evaluated on two publicly available MRI datasets Kfold validation suggests 98 accuracy on both datasets The model was compared with the six stateoftheart SOTA CNNs and transfer learning Among the SOTA CNNs DenseNet121 and VGG16 achieved the highest accuracy of 96 The novelty of BrainFusionNet is that the hybrid model effectively extracts local and global features from MRI images even in smallscale tumor regions and small tumor sizes The model has a balanced sequential CNN architecture to capture lowlevel and deeperlayer features a customized ViT that captures local features stabilizes gradient flow and reduces the risk of vanishing gradients during MRI image training The CNN and ViT outputs are fed into a GRU for final classification Furthermore we analyze pixel intensities to determine whether MRI image quality affects image classification Our findings are very novel in image interpretation as we found that the distribution of pixel intensities in MRI images affects DL performance

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

TwinBI: An Agentic Digital Twin for Efficient Augmented Interactions with Business Intelligence Dashboards

arXiv:2606.13731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Business intelligence (BI) increasingly combines dashboard interaction with LLM-based assistance, but these two modes often fall out of sync during multi-step analysis. As users switch between direct dashboard manipulation and natural-language queries, it becomes difficult to preserve a consistent analytical state across filters, hierarchies, metrics, and chart context. We present TwinBI, an agentic digital-twin framework that couples an LLM-based agent system with an executable BI dashboard state. TwinBI unifies conversational interaction, dashboard manipulation, semantic grounding, and provenance tracking through a shared analytical state reconstructed from a unified interaction log. It also exposes artifacts such as schema views, SQL, logs, and an /insights command for state-grounded analytical summaries. We evaluate TwinBI in two complementary ways. In a controlled A/B benchmark with the same backbone agent, TwinBI improves exact-match accuracy from 43.3% to 63.3%, partial-credit accuracy from 48.3% to 70.8%, and substantially reduces timeout rate from 40.0% to 10.0% relative to Dashboard alone. In a usability study, participants benefited from the integrated dashboard-and-chat workflow, with high task accuracy, moderate workload, and favorable ratings for state-aware interaction mechanisms. These results suggest that TwinBI improves both agent-level analytical reliability and user-facing analytical support by turning visible dashboard state into richer actionable context. Our dataset and source code are available at: https://github.com/simonjisu/TwinBI

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

Boosting Knowledge Graph Foundation Models via Enhanced Negative Sampling

arXiv:2605.27023v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge graphs (KGs) have become the core backbone of numerous downstream tasks such as question answering and recommender systems. However, despite all this, KGs are often very incomplete. To perform zero-shot knowledge graph completion in unseen KGs, which have different relational vocabularies from those used for pre-training, KG foundation models (KGFMs) receive a wide range of attention. Existing KGFMs often perform training using random negative triples, which are constructed by replacing the head or tail entity of a positive triple with a random entity. However, these negative triples are often constructed with limited quality, providing weak supervision for KGFM training. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective adaptive negative sampling approach, KMAS, to enhance existing KGFMs. KMAS constructs hard negative triples through the updated relation embeddings generated from the existing KGFM's relation encoder. To further adaptively align with the evolving capability of the KGFM during the training process, KMAS adjusts the ratio of hard negative triples dynamically throughout the whole training process: after a warmup phrase, it increases the ratio linearly and then decreases linearly. Extensive experiments are conducted over 44 data sets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed negative sampling method can enhance many SOTA KGFMs without requiring excessive additional time or memory consumption.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Stochastic Reaction Networks Within Interacting Compartments with Content-Dependent Fragmentation

arXiv:2511.10223v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic reaction networks with mass-action kinetics provide a useful framework for understanding processes – biochemical and otherwise – in homogeneous environments. However, cellular reactions are often compartmentalized, either at the cell level or within cells, and hence non-homogeneous. We investigate a model of compartmentalization in which the rate of fragmentation of a compartment depends on the abundance of some designated species inside that compartment. The particular model of study is part of a general framework for compartmentalized chemistry with dynamic compartments that was proposed in (Duso and Zechner, PNAS, 2020). This paper builds on (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) where the special case where the compartment dynamics do not depend on their contents was studied mathematically. In particular, we demonstrate that the explosivity characterization from (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) fails in this setting and provide new sufficient conditions for non-explosivity and positive recurrence, under the assumption that the underlying CRN admits a linear Lyapunov function. These results extend the theoretical foundation for modeling content-mediated compartment dynamics, with implications for systems such as cell division and intracellular transport.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

An Integrated Framework for Transcriptomic Characterization and Lorentzian Hyperbolic Visualization of a High-Risk Topological Branch in Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a highly heterogeneous brain disorder in which molecular alterations vary across brain regions, disease stages, and patient subgroups. This study introduces an integrated analytical framework for characterizing transcriptomic variation associated with a high-risk topological branch, which was identified based on Lorentz distance in postmortem Brodmann area 36 samples from the Mount Sinai Brain Bank cohort, where over 70% of samples were in Braak stages V-VI. The framework integrates weighted gene co-expression network analysis, repeated stability-based differential expression analysis, network-level gene filtering, Gene Ontology enrichment, and nested stratified cross-validation to evaluate whether topological branch-associated genes capture biologically meaningful signals and carry predictive information for high-Braak group status. The identified gene sets were functionally enriched for neuronal development, neuron projection organization, synaptic signaling, vesicle fusion, and regulated synaptic release, suggesting that the high-risk topological branch reflects biologically relevant transcriptomic programs linked to neurodegenerative progression. Nested cross-validation further showed that the selected genes achieved measurable internal predictive performance for distinguishing high-Braak samples. As a second methodological contribution, we introduced a Lorentzian hyperbolic variant of t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (Lorentz t-SNE) to explore latent non-Euclidean structure in transcriptomic data. This method embeds samples in hyperbolic space, providing an alternative to Euclidean embeddings for representing hierarchical or nonlinear structures. Compared with conventional Euclidean embeddings, the proposed Lorentz t-SNE revealed a more localized organization of high-Braak samples. Together, these results demonstrate the utility of the proposed analytical framework and Lorentz t-SNE for investigating heterogeneous, potentially non-Euclidean organization in AD transcriptomes.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Spin correlations, low-energy scales, and anisotropy scaling in kagome frustrated magnets

arXiv:2606.12512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neutron scattering is central to identifying quantum states of magnetic materials. In the search for quantum spin liquids, broad spectral features of inelastic spectra have been cited as evidence for spinon excitations, but can also arise from magnon excitations excitations in the presence of quenched disorder and strong magnon interactions. We develop a new approach to this problem, based on the adiabatic continuity in the $XXZ$ Heisenberg model on geometrically frustrating (GF) lattices as a function of the model's anisotropy. Using this approach, we identify universal features and energies of finite-temperature spin correlators. Focusing on the kagome lattice, we show that the low-energy spin spectral function contains robust, momentum-independent peaks with frequencies: $\omega_1 \approx 3.4 T^*$ and $\omega_2 \approx 6.3 T^*$, where the ``hidden energy scale'' $T^*$ is the characteristic scale of a low-temperature peak in the heat capacity, at which many GF magnets also display spin-glass freezing. We show that the spectral features at low energies $\omega\lesssim T^*$ arise from single-magnon scattering and identify the magnetizations of the respective excitations. We explore the evolution of the spectral features with temperature and discuss extensions to other GF lattices. Our results provide a sharp spectroscopic criterion for interpreting neutron scattering in kagome and other GF quantum magnets.

16.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

Catecholamine precursor modulation of human exploration: Evidence from a large gender-balanced sample

by Angela Mariele Brands, Kilian Knauth, David Mathar, Tim Roedder, Kerstin Lisner, Jan Peters The catecholamine precursor Tyrosine has been linked to improved cognitive performance, but investigations into decision-making and reinforcement learning processes known to be under catecholamine control are sparse. We examined the impact of a single dose of Tyrosine (2g) on reinforcement learning and exploration in a large (n = 63) gender-balanced sample in a within-subjects preregistered study. Reinforcement learning performance was significantly improved under Tyrosine. Based on previous work, we preregistered the hypotheses that Tyrosine would reduce directed exploration, response times, and physiological arousal. However, neither response times nor physiological arousal revealed the predicted reductions. Computational modelling using an established pre-registered reinforcement learning model revealed that the performance improvement under Tyrosine was due to an increase value-driven exploitation, without affecting directed exploration. Non-preregistered modelling analyses then revealed that accounting for higher-order perseveration substantially improved model fit, and substantiated the observation of increased value-driven exploitation under Tyrosine. Furthermore, it revealed reliable reductions in directed exploration and value-independent perseveration under Tyrosine. Tyrosine thus improved reinforcement learning performance by stabilizing choice patterns in the service of optimizing reward accumulation, modulating several computational mechanisms thought to be under catecholamine control.

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

An Empirical Study on Predictive Maintenance for Component X in Heavy-Duty Scania Trucks

arXiv:2606.12486v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Condition-based Predictive Maintenance (PdM) for truck fleets has gained momentum in recent years. This maintenance strategy aims to minimize unplanned downtimes and reduce costs by monitoring the health status of vehicles and taking proactive action based on their condition. However, the implementation of condition-based PdM systems is challenging due to the large volume of data generated by the trucks, the inherent complexity of detecting failures through sensor data and the difficulties in finding cost-effective trade-offs in the solution's implementation. In this paper, we define and validate a condition-based PdM methodology built on the assumption that the wear-and-tear state of the monitored component can be represented as a monotonically non-decreasing time series. It involves selecting only the most recent observations from the time series and transforming them into a tabular format for classification using machine learning (ML) models designed for tabular data. Our results indicate that the proposed methodology reduces costs on the Scania Component X dataset compared to current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches, while also simplifying the modeling process through AutoML.

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

CogniFold: Always-On Proactive Memory via Cognitive Folding

Existing agent memory remains predominantly reactive and retrieval-based, lacking the capacity to autonomously organize experience into persistent cognitive structure. Toward genuinely autonomous agents, we introduce CogniFold, a brain-inspired "always-on" agent memory designed for the next generation of proactive assistants. CogniFold continuously folds fragmented event streams into self-emerging cognitive structures, bootstrapping progressively higher-level cognition from incoming events and accumulated knowledge. We ground this by extending Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory from two layers (hippocampus, neocortex) to three, adding a prefrontal intent layer. Emulating the prefrontal cortex as the locus of intentional control and decision-making, CogniFold achieves this through graph-topology self-organization: cognitive structures proactively assemble under the stream, merge when semantically similar, decay when stale, relink through associative recall, and surface intents when concept-cluster density crosses a threshold. We evaluate structural formation using CogEval-Bench, demonstrating that CogniFold uniquely produces memory structures that match cognitive expectations and concept emergence. Furthermore, across eight downstream benchmarks – two probing long-term conversational memory (LoCoMo, LongMemEval) and six spanning other cognitive domains – we validate that CogniFold simultaneously performs robustly on conventional memory tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/OpenNorve/CogniFold.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling via Early-Step Latent Verification for Image Editing

Instruction-based image editing has made notable progress with recent advances in generative models. However, the quality of the edited result is still influenced by the randomly sampled initial noise, particularly in complex editing scenarios. An unsuitable initial noise may lead to unsatisfactory editing results. Recent inference-time scaling methods address this issue by sampling multiple initial noises and selecting better candidates. Nevertheless, most of them follow a decode-then-verify scheme which introduces an efficiency-accuracy trade-off. When decoding is performed after limited inference steps, the decoded images often remain too noisy for reliable assessment, whereas sufficiently denoised images require much higher computational cost. To address this issue, we propose VeriLatent, a plug-and-play adaptive inference-time scaling framework with early-step latent verification for image editing. Specifically, we propose a novel verifier that scores each initial noise through a latent-space editing activation map at an early stage. It identifies promising candidates by assessing whether they can induce an effective edit in the correct region. This enables efficient early pruning without decoding latents into images. Building on this, we further develop an adaptive search strategy for inference-time scaling. It allocates inference budgets according to editing difficulty, thereby reducing the number of function evaluations (NFE). Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and different base models demonstrate that VeriLatent consistently improves both editing performance and inference-time scaling efficiency.

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

Semantic-Preserving Prompt Hijacking: A Black-Box Adversarial Attack on Auto-Prompt Optimization

LLMs increasingly integrate auto-suggestion optimization modules, enabling them to rewrite and display user input before generating the final response. While this design aims to enhance transparency and trust, its process of autonomously selecting a single best result from multiple candidate solutions allows attackers to hijack this optimization process by inducing subtle, imperceptible semantic shifts. To address this, we propose a semantic preservation hijacking attack method based on black-box conditions: Adaptive Greedy Local Search. This method hierarchically decomposes the input text, masks key language units, and dynamically adjusts candidate replacement words at predefined semantic checkpoints. This maximizes the deviation between the model output and the original intent while strictly maintaining semantic similarity to the original text. Experimental results on commercial and open-source LLMs demonstrate that, under the same semantic similarity constraints, this method achieves a higher attack success rate than existing attack methods in over 2400 test cases. Code is available at: https://github.com/franz-chang/DOBS

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ORAgentBench: Can LLM Agents Solve Challenging Operations Research Tasks End to End?

arXiv:2606.19787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-step tasks in executable environments, yet their ability to perform realistic operations research (OR) work remains unclear. Existing OR evaluations often decouple modeling from solving, rely on pre-formalized or text-only instances, and rarely test the full workflow from operational artifacts to validated decisions. In this work, we introduce ORAgentBench, an execution-grounded benchmark for evaluating autonomous agents on challenging end-to-end operations research tasks. It contains 107 human-reviewed tasks across diverse operational scenarios, each packaged in an isolated environment with a natural-language brief, multi-file data, configuration artifacts, and a required submission schema. Agents must write and run solution code, and their submissions are evaluated by hidden validators for schema validity, hard-constraint feasibility, and normalized objective quality. Experiments with fourteen frontier agent-model configurations show that current agents remain far from reliable OR practice. The best agent passes only 35.51% of all tasks and 20.59% of hard tasks, and many feasible submissions still fall below the required quality threshold. Failure analysis further shows that errors are dominated by strategic weaknesses, including missed operational rules, brittle formulations, weak feasible-solution construction, and insufficient solution improvement. OR-specific procedural skills increase hard-task feasibility, but do not reliably improve solution quality or pass rate. These results suggest that progress in OR agents requires moving beyond plausible optimization code toward dependable, high-quality operational decision-making.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Unsupervised Diffusion Solver for Combinatorial Optimization via Combinatorial Adjoint Matching

arXiv:2605.30920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based neural solvers have shown strong promise for combinatorial optimization (CO), but existing methods typically rely on supervised training with large collections of near-optimal solutions. In this work, we extend adjoint-based trajectory optimization methods to discrete combinatorial domains. We formulate diffusion-based CO as a stochastic control problem over Continuous-Time Markov Chains and introduce discrete adjoint dynamics for propagating optimization signals through discrete generative trajectories. Building on this formulation, we propose Combinatorial Adjoint Matching (CAM), an unsupervised training framework for discrete diffusion solvers with structured and low-variance trajectory-level optimization signals. Empirically, CAM consistently outperforms existing unsupervised diffusion baselines and achieves performance competitive with strong supervised diffusion solvers and even traditional solvers across diverse combinatorial optimization problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/Shengyu-Feng/CAM.

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

ResearchClawBench: A Benchmark for End-to-End Autonomous Scientific Research

AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify. We present ResearchClawBench, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous scientific research across 40 tasks from 10 scientific domains. Each task is grounded in a real published paper, provides related literature and raw data, and hides the target paper during evaluation. Expert-curated multimodal rubrics decompose the target scientific artifacts into weighted criteria, enabling evaluation of target-paper-level re-discovery while leaving room for new discovery. We evaluate seven autonomous research (auto-research) agents under a unified protocol and seventeen native LLMs through the lightweight ResearchHarness. Current systems remain far from reliable re-discovery: the strongest autonomous agent, Claude Code, averages 21.5, and the strongest ResearchHarness LLM, Claude-Opus-4.7, averages 20.7, with an LLM frontier mean of only 26.5. Error analysis shows that failures concentrate in experimental protocol mismatch, evidence mismatch, and missing scientific core. ResearchClawBench provides a reproducible evaluation frontier for measuring progress toward autonomous scientific research.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Repeated Bilateral Trade: The Quest for Fairness

arXiv:2606.15369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study repeated bilateral trade from a fairness perspective. At each round, a fresh seller-buyer pair arrives, and the platform posts a price before observing the traders' valuations. Trade occurs only if both agents accept the price. Rather than maximizing only the gain from trade, we consider platforms that seek balanced divisions of the generated surplus. We show that natural fairness desiderata lead to a one-parameter Rawls-to-Nash family of fair-gain objectives, obtained by aggregating the seller's and buyer's net gains through nonpositive Hölder means. Unlike the standard gain-from-trade objective and the Rawlsian fair-gain objective studied in prior work, our proposed objectives induce a new statistical structure in which expected rewards are recovered from threshold feedback through a two-dimensional singular-kernel integral identity. This leads to a nonstandard pure-exploration problem whose natural estimators are rectangular double sums with row-column dependence and singular weights. Assuming independent i.i.d. seller and buyer valuation sequences with arbitrary unknown marginals, we characterize the optimal learning rates for the whole Rawls-to-Nash family of fair-gain objectives, giving matching fixed-confidence sample-complexity and regret bounds up to polylogarithmic factors.

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

Every Act Has Its Price: Compressed Moral Composition in Frontier LLMs

Existing LLM moral benchmarks usually ask which isolated moral act, value, or foundation a model prefers. This is useful but incomplete. Realistic judgments often require a model to combine several moral signals within the same option. We introduce **Moral Trolley Arena**, a two-stage blind ELO benchmark for measuring how LLMs compose moral evidence. The single-scene arena first calibrates individual moral acts from a 229-scenario corpus across five Moral Foundations Theory foundations; the composite arena then combines calibrated acts into two-act moral items over a controlled intensity grid and measures the resulting composite preferences. Across ten frontier models, composite judgments are largely predicted by component act strength, but the relation is consistently compressed rather than simply additive. Models also show non-additive intensity anchoring, bounded foundation-specific residuals after component control, and highly convergent composite preference surfaces across providers. These results suggest that moral audits should measure composition rules for moral evidence, not only rankings over isolated acts.