Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Rumination as a cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement: evidence from the CARING study

Purpose. Perinatal loss is associated with a high risk of persistent psychological distress, including prolonged grief, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Cognitive processes such as rumination may play a crucial role in maintaining and amplifying distress following loss, yet their specific contribution in perinatal bereavement remains underexplored. Methods. The CARING (Cognitive Analysis and Rumination INvestigation in perinatal Grief) study employed a cross-sectional design involving 298 parents who experienced perinatal loss within the previous five years. Participants completed an anonymous online survey including measures of depressive rumination (Ruminative Response Scale, RRS), angry rumination (Anger Rumination Scale, ARS), perinatal grief (Perinatal Grief Scale, PGS), general psychopathology (SCL-90), and post-traumatic stress symptoms (NSESSS). Non-parametric analyses were conducted to examine associations between rumination patterns and psychological outcomes. Results. Higher levels of rumination were significantly associated with greater perinatal grief, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and post-traumatic stress. Depressive rumination showed consistently stronger associations with all outcomes compared to angry rumination. Participants presenting both depressive and angry rumination exhibited the highest levels of grief intensity, psychological distress, and PTSD symptoms, suggesting a graded relationship between rumination patterns and severity of distress. Rumination levels were not significantly associated with gestational age at loss or with having received psychological support. Conclusions. Rumination, particularly in its depressive form, appears to function as a transdiagnostic cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement. These findings highlight rumination as a potential target for early screening and tailored psychological interventions aimed at reducing long-term distress following perinatal loss.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Development and validation of a risk prediction algorithm to estimate all-cause mortality among community-dwelling Canadians: the Mortality Population Risk Tool (MPoRT)

BACKGROUND: The risk of all-cause mortality can inform decision-making for chronic disease prevention. We developed a predictive algorithm to estimate the 5-year risk of death among community-dwelling adults. METHODS: We derived and validated the Mortality Population Risk Tool (MPoRT) using data from population health surveys in Canada (the Canadian Community Health Survey) and the United States (the National Health Interview Survey), survey years 2001 to 2011, linked to vital statistics. The outcome was death within five years of the survey response. The algorithm was developed using data from Ontario respondents using a Cox proportional hazards model, then modified and re-estimated to allow cross-national assessment in Canada and the United States. Twenty-three prespecified predictors were assessed: seven sociodemographic, six behavioural, and ten general health and chronic disease. RESULTS: 527,369 respondents aged 20 to 105 years were included in the Canadian and United States development and validation cohorts, with 43,758 deaths during 3.68 million person-years follow-up. The final sex-specific MPoRT algorithms each contained 21 variables, showing strong discrimination (C-statistic: females 0.874 [0.871–0.877]; males 0.867 [0.865–0.871]) and good calibration overall and in 246 of 247 subgroups. Discrimination was modestly attenuated (0.01 decrease in C-statistic) in cross-national validation between Canada and the United States, with good calibration across all 71 subgroups. INTERPRETATION: MPoRT accurately discriminated all-cause mortality using only self-reported data, enabling broad application without clinical measures. While validation outside North America is needed to confirm broader applicability, MPoRT is designed for straightforward recalibration using routinely available national mortality data. This supports targeted chronic disease prevention strategies at both the population and individual levels, though the limitations inherent to self-reported predictors should be considered when interpreting predictions.

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

The existence of invariant sublinear expectations for $G$-SDEs

arXiv:2606.15203v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study the existence of invariant sublinear expectations of Markovian semigroups on sublinear expectation spaces. To achieve this, we establish a complete metric space of sublinear expectations, on which we extend Harris' method to the nonlinear setting on the convergence of sublinear semigroups. We then explore two cases of $G-$diffusions by studying the Lyapunov function and the local Doeblin condition. One is the $G-$Brownian motion on the unit circle which is the case studied in Feng and Zhao [Zhaonon], but with the new method. Another is the multidimensional $G-$SDEs on the whole space $\mathbb{R}^d$. We establish, for the first time in the literature, the existence of the invariant sublinear expectation for $G-$SDEs under the non-degenerate and weakly dissipative assumption. For this, we prove that for a class of $G-$SDEs, the $G-$expectation can be represented as the supremum of the semigroup of a family of SDEs, of which the regularity is obtained by considering the Bismut-Elworthy-Li formula and the Denis-Hu-Peng representation for the distribution of $G-$Brownian motions.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Dual-Uncertainty Guided Policy Learning for Multimodal Reasoning

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced reasoning capabilities in multimodal large language models. However, existing methods typically treat visual inputs as deterministic, overlooking the perceptual ambiguity inherent to the visual modality. Consequently, they fail to distinguish whether a model's uncertainty stems from complex reasoning or ambiguous perception, preventing the targeted allocation of exploration or learning signals. To address this gap, we introduce DUPL, a dual-uncertainty guided policy learning approach for multimodal RLVR that quantifies and leverages both perceptual uncertainty (via symmetric KL divergence) and output uncertainty (via policy entropy) to guide policy updates. By establishing an uncertainty-driven feedback loop and employing a dynamic branch prioritization mechanism, DUPL recalibrates the policy advantage to focus learning on states with high perceptual or decisional ambiguity, enabling effective targeted exploration beyond passive data augmentation. Evaluated on diverse multimodal reasoning benchmarks spanning mathematical and general domains, DUPL achieves solid gains. It improves Qwen2.5-VL accuracy by up to $12.3%$ (3B) and $7.9%$ (7B), and Qwen3-VL-Instruct by up to $10.7%$ (4B) and $12.4%$ (8B), consistently outperforming GRPO, while seamlessly generalizing to alternative algorithms (DAPO, $+6.5%$ avg) and architectures (LLaVA-OneVision-1.5, $+4.7%$ avg). These results demonstrate that DUPL is an effective and generalizable approach for multimodal RLVR.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Hidden Degradation Costs in Energy-Cost-Only HEMS Optimisation: Study on Battery and PV Sensitivity

arXiv:2606.16051v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Residential battery energy storage systems (BESS) are increasingly deployed alongside photovoltaic (PV) generation to reduce household energy costs under volatile time-of-use (TOU) tariffs. Model predictive control (MPC) is a widely adopted optimisation strategy for home energy management systems (HEMS), typically formulated to minimise net energy cost, subject to physical and operational constraints. However, battery degradation is rarely embedded in the optimisation objective, meaning its cost is unquantified and aggressive; high-cycle-count strategies could incur significant losses once deployed to physical systems. This paper presents a receding-horizon mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) baseline for a UK residential HEMS, using demand data from the REFIT dataset. A 3 by 3 sensitivity study is conducted across three battery sizes and three PV array sizes, with post-hoc degradation cost estimated using the Naumann stress model and rainflow cycle counting. Results show that degradation remains constant for each battery size and can exceed energy cost savings by up to 1,060 %. These results demonstrate that energy-cost-only optimisation systematically underestimates the true system cost, motivating a degradation-aware control formulation.

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

MiroBench: Benchmarking Realism in Agentic Simulation of Real-world Discussions

arXiv:2606.14715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly used to simulate real world interactions, but it remains unclear whether simulated behaviors preserve the content patterns and interaction dynamics of real human behaviors. Existing evaluations remain fragmented, which makes it difficult to compare systems or measure progress. In this paper, we focus on Reddit discussions as a concrete first step toward evaluating real-world social simulation. Reddit threads provide public, topic-grounded, multi-party interactions where people share experiences, debate, seek advice, express emotion, and collectively respond to products, events, and social issues. These discussions offer an observable window into broader social behavior, making them a useful setting for testing whether LLM agents can reproduce not only fluent text, but also the distributional patterns and interaction dynamics of real online communities. We introduce MiroBench, a benchmark for Reddit discussion simulation built from 4,292 real Reddit threads. MiroBench uses statistical tests to compare generated and real discussions across four major aspects: repetition and semantic uniformity, narrative content, toxicity and aggression, and structural complexity. Experiments across five domains and five models show that current simulators remain distributionally mismatched with real Reddit threads, while a lightweight prompt-based improvement procedure provides only limited gains. MiroBench offers a concrete benchmark for measuring, diagnosing, and improving realism in LLM-based social simulation.

08.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-04

Cell differentiation can underpin the reproducibility of morphogenesis

by Dominic K. Devlin, Austen R. D. Ganley, Nobuto Takeuchi Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we ask how this reproducibility is achieved by evolving complex morphologies in a multi-scale, computational model. Each morphology consists of a population of cells on a two-dimensional grid using the Cellular Potts Model framework. Each cell contains a genome that encodes a gene regulatory network, morphogens for cell-cell signalling, and proteins that determine cell behaviours. By repeatedly simulating our model with different initial conditions under selection for shape complexity, we obtained a “zoo” of evolved morphologies. We find that these evolved, complex morphologies are reproducible in a sizeable fraction of simulations, despite no direct selection for reproducibility. We show that high reproducibility is caused by spatially segregating moving cells that “shape” morphologies from stationary cells that “maintain” morphologies during morphogenesis. Strikingly, most highly reproducible morphologies also evolved cell differentiation, where proliferative, moving progenitor cells irreversibly differentiate into non-dividing, stationary differentiated cells at tissue boundaries. These results suggest that cell differentiation observed in natural development plays a fundamental role in morphogenesis in addition to the production of specialised cell types. This previously unrecognised role of cell differentiation has major implications for our understanding of how morphologies are generated and regenerated.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Active Sampling for Ultra-Low-Bit-Rate Video Compression via Conditional Controlled Diffusion

Diffusion models provide a powerful generative prior for perceptual reconstruction at ultra-low bitrates, but effective video compression requires controlling the generative process using highly compact conditioning signals. In this work, we present ActDiff-VC, a diffusion-based video compression framework for the ultra-low-bitrate regime. Our method partitions videos into variable-length segments, transmits keyframes only when needed, and summarizes temporal dynamics using a compact set of tracked point trajectories. Conditioned on these sparse signals, a conditional diffusion decoder synthesizes the remaining frames, enabling perceptually realistic reconstruction under severe rate constraints. To support this design, we introduce two mechanisms: content-adaptive keyframe selection and budget-aware sparse trajectory selection, which together enable compact yet effective conditioning for generative reconstruction. Experiments on the UVG and MCL-JCV benchmarks show that ActDiff-VC achieves up to 64.6\% bitrate reduction at matched NIQE, improves KID by up to 64.6\% and FID by up to 37.7\% at comparable bitrates against strong learned codecs, and delivers favorable perceptual rate–distortion trade-offs relative to learned and diffusion-based baselines in the ultra-low-bitrate regime.

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

RepNet: Tackling spectral bias in deep neural networks via parameter reparameterization

arXiv:2606.16575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in scientific computing, yet they often suffer from spectral bias in capturing oscillatory and multiscale behaviors. In this study, we investigate this limitation by examining the failure of shallow ReLU neural networks in fitting high-frequency functions. This observation identifies two important factors in resolving rapid oscillations: the initial slope scale and the distribution of partition points induced by the networks. Motivated by this analysis, we propose RepNet, a reparameterized DNN model for ReLU and tanh networks designed for high-frequency and multiscale problems. The key idea is to reparameterize the weights and biases in the first hidden layer, which enables effective control of the initial slope scale and provides an appropriate distribution of the initial partition points. Furthermore, treating the reparameterized weights and biases as trainable parameters allows the DNN to achieve adaptive frequency scaling during training. In addition, we derive quantitative estimates for the output and slope magnitudes of the reparameterized DNN to guide the initialization of the proposed method. Numerical experiments, including multiscale one- and four-dimensional function approximation, forward and inverse PDE problems in combination with physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), and operator learning, demonstrate that RepNet improves the predicted accuracy of vanilla DNNs in capturing highly oscillatory features with slightly additional computational cost. These results indicate that RepNet provides an effective and flexible approach for overcoming spectral bias and applying DNNs to multiscale problems.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.18844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.

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

ArtNet: A JEPA-Like Articulatory Predictive Framework for Robust Zero-Shot Phoneme Recognition

arXiv:2606.16595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot cross-lingual phoneme recognition is often hindered by the fragility of direct acoustic-to-symbol mapping, which is susceptible to language-specific variations. Echoing joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) work in vision, we propose ArtNet, a framework that explores a structured feature prediction task based on articulatory features to enhance acoustic robustness. Specifically, ArtNet integrates an articulatory predictor, designed to extract universal articulatory representations from self-supervised learning (SSL) features, with a variational information bottleneck (VIB) to suppress language-specific variations. Experiments on seven unseen languages demonstrate that ArtNet, particularly when synergized with the proposed vector-space inventory alignment (VSIA) strategy, significantly outperforms competitive baselines, achieving a 20.56\% relative reduction in phoneme error rate (PER) and 7.01\% in phoneme feature error rate (PFER).

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Real-order moments, tail representations, and logarithmic means

arXiv:2606.14019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a unified framework for the study of real-order moments of arbitrary random variables. General integral representations are established in terms of cumulative distribution functions and survival functions, covering continuous, discrete, and mixed distributions supported on the whole real line. These formulas extend the classical tail-integral identities for nonnegative random variables and provide a common treatment of positive, fractional, and negative moments. For discrete distributions, explicit series representations are derived in terms of cumulative probabilities, yielding simple criteria for the existence of moments. Applications are presented for the zeta and Skellam distributions, illustrating how tail behavior determines moment finiteness and how moments can be represented geometrically through cumulative distribution functions. In addition, a representation for logarithmic moments is obtained, linking logarithmic means, Laplace transforms, and the classical Frullani identity. The results provide a unified perspective on moment representations and establish useful connections between tail probabilities, distribution functions, Laplace transforms, and moment existence.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

TSA: Temporal Slot Activation for Persistent Object-Centric Video Representation

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into temporally persistent entity representations. Existing recurrent video slot-attention methods propagate a fixed set of slots across frames, but typically assume unconditional slot propagation: every slot is updated and decoded at every frame, regardless of whether its corresponding object is visible. We show that this design violates a basic lifecycle requirement for persistent slots: when an object is absent or fully occluded, its slot should preserve its previous state and avoid explaining unrelated visible content. Instead, unconditional propagation creates two failure pathways: update-induced state drift, where current-frame evidence overwrites the absent object's representation, and decoder-induced reconstruction interference, where the inactive slot remains coupled to reconstruction through decoder attention. We propose Temporal Slot Activation (TSA), a mechanism that learns a per-slot, per-frame activation score $\alpha_{k,t} \in (0, 1)$ without visibility supervision. TSA uses this activation as a shared latent control variable for slot lifecycle modeling. When a slot is inactive, TSA anchors its state to the previous slot via activation-gated updating and suppresses its decoder participation through an activation-dependent additive bias on attention logits before softmax normalization. This jointly reduces state drift and reconstruction-driven interference. To improve decisions under partial occlusion and gradual reappearance, TSA further conditions activation prediction on a per-slot temporal memory produced by a Temporal Context Encoder. We evaluate TSA on MOVi-C/E, YT-VIS, and OVIS benchmarks using both standard and tracking-based metrics (FG-ARI, mBO, IDF1, HOTA). TSA consistently improves object decomposition and temporal identity preservation, with large gains on long, heavily occluded videos.

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

Fibonacci Steady-States and Persistent Oscillations in an Ordered Multimode Dicke Model

arXiv:2606.13072v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultracold atoms in multimode optical cavities provide a rich testbed for many-body phenomena enabled by light-mediated interactions. Recent experiments include realizations of spin glasses and associative memories, as described by multimode Dicke models with disordered couplings. However, the properties of multimode Dicke models with ordered coupling geometries remain largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate the stable steady-states of the multimode Dicke model with an ordered nearest-neighbor coupling geometry, where $n_c$ atomic clusters are coupled via $n_c-1$ cavity modes. We show that the number of mean-field stable steady-states in the superradiant phase exhibits Fibonacci scaling with the number of atomic clusters, and that a subset of these steady-states exhibit persistent oscillations. Using both the truncated Wigner approximation and the numerically-exact hierarchy of pure states, we further demonstrate that these features of the stable steady-state solutions persist for finite cluster sizes. Ordered multimode Dicke models, such as the nearest-neighbor coupling geometry considered here, are accessible with current experimental technologies and point toward a broader class of strongly interacting dissipative systems with similarly rich behavior.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

TimeLAVA: Learning-Agnostic Data Valuation for Time Series

arXiv:2606.18729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data valuation quantifies the intrinsic quality of individual samples to enable principled data curation, quality control, and robust learning. For time series in critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and industrial monitoring, effective valuation methods are essential yet fundamentally lacking. Existing approaches are either model-dependent, limiting their generalizability, or designed for i.i.d. data and thus fail to capture temporal dependencies, multi-scale patterns, and non-stationary dynamics inherent to sequential data. We introduce TimeLAVA, a learning-agnostic framework that values temporal segments by their marginal contribution to minimizing distributional discrepancy between evaluated and reference data. At its core is a novel Selective Wavelet-based Wasserstein discrepancy combining multi-scale wavelet transforms for temporal localization with unbalanced optimal transport for robustness to distributional shifts. Segment values are efficiently computed via sensitivity analysis without requiring model training and aggregated into point-wise scores. We provide theoretical guarantees linking valuation to model-agnostic generalization and prove bounded sensitivity to outlier contamination. Extensive experiments across anomaly detection, data pruning, and label noise detection demonstrate that TimeLAVA produces significantly more informative value scores than existing methods on diverse real-world datasets.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

PeptiDIA: A Machine Learning Framework for Enhanced Peptide Identification in Fast-Gradient Data-Independent Acquisition Proteomics

Data-independent acquisition (DIA) mass spectrometry has become increasingly prevalent in proteomics as advances in instrumentation, chromatography, and computational analysis have enabled robust proteome identification across complex biological samples. However, analytical depth achieved with fast chromatographic gradients remains lower than that obtained using long-gradients, reflecting a throughput-depth trade-off. Here, we present PeptiDIA, a machine learning framework that enhances peptide identification in fast-gradient DIA data by leveraging paired fast and long-gradient acquisitions from identical samples. PeptiDIA processes DIA-NN outputs generated at relaxed false discovery rate thresholds to obtain expanded candidate peptide pools and trains gradient-boosted decision tree models using long-gradient identifications as reference labels. The model integrates DIA-NN features with engineered peptide descriptors and applies isotonic regression to calibrate probabilities, enabling controlled peptide recovery relative to the long-gradient reference. Applied to human and murine datasets spanning six tissues acquired on an Orbitrap Exploris 480, PeptiDIA increased peptide identifications by 25-34% at 1% target reference-discordance rate (RDR) and increased the number of protein groups containing at least one rescued peptide by 15-17%. Overall, PeptiDIA improves the identification depth of fast-gradient DIA-NN workflows without altering acquisition strategies. The framework is available as a web application and command-line tool at https://github.com/Jordano700/PeptiDIA.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Scene-Adaptive Nonlinear Tone Curves for Pseudo Ground-Truth Generation in Low-Light 3D Gaussian Splatting

Low-light novel view synthesis is challenging because dark multi-view images contain noise, weak structural detail, and compressed dynamic range. Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods address these challenges by generating pseudo ground-truth (pseudo-GT) images as supervision targets when paired normal-light references are unavailable. Existing pseudo-GT methods apply a uniform linear gain to all pixels, which clips bright regions while providing insufficient enhancement in dark regions, limiting reconstruction quality. We observe that nonlinear tone mappings, long established in 2D low-light enhancement, have not been explored for pseudo-GT generation in 3D reconstruction. Accordingly, we propose a scene-adaptive nonlinear tone-curve framework that replaces linear pseudo-GT with nonlinear alternatives. The framework introduces percentile-based normalisation for scene-agnostic curve application, a scene-adaptive offset for automatic black-level adjustment, and two complementary curves: Adaptive SoftExp (ASE), a bounded exponential curve, and Adaptive Poly3 (AP3), a data-driven cubic polynomial. The module changes only the pseudo-GT computation and leaves the 3DGS backbone unchanged. Experiments on three benchmarks covering 21 scenes show that both curves consistently outperform the linear baseline with PSNR improvements up to +4.34 dB on LOM and +3.25 dB on RealX3D. Both curves achieve similar performance despite their different mathematical forms, suggesting the improvement is curve-agnostic. Code is available at https://github.com/lvmingzhe/adaptiveToneCurve

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

Mixtures of Subspaces for Bandwidth Efficient Context Parallel Training

arXiv:2606.16384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretraining language models with extended context windows enhances their ability to leverage rich information during generation. Existing methods split input sequences into chunks, broadcast them across multiple devices, and compute attention block by block which incurs significant communication overhead. While feasible in high-speed clusters, these methods are impractical for decentralized training over low-bandwidth connections. We propose a compression method for communication-efficient context parallelism in decentralized settings, achieving a remarkable compression rate of over 95\% with negligible overhead and no loss in convergence. Our key insight is to exploit the intrinsic low-rank structure of activation outputs by dynamically constraining them to learned mixtures of subspaces via efficient reparameterizations. We demonstrate scaling billion-parameter decentralized models to context lengths exceeding 100K tokens on networks as slow as 300Mbps, matching the wall-clock convergence speed of centralized models on 100Gbps interconnects.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

R2D-RL: A RoboCup 2D Soccer Environment for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot soccer is a challenging testbed for multi-agent reinforcement learning because it combines partial observability, cooperative and adversarial interaction, sparse rewards, and long-horizon tactical behavior. RoboCup 2D Soccer Simulation (RCSS2D) provides a mature robot-soccer platform, but its competition-oriented server-client architecture is difficult to use directly with modern Python-based MARL workflows. We introduce R2D-RL, a reinforcement learning environment that connects RCSS2D and HELIOS-based player clients to a Python MARL interface through shared-memory communication and cycle-level synchronization. R2D-RL supports full-field and scenario-based training with configurable opponents, Base discrete and Hybrid parameterized action spaces, action masks, expected possession value (EPV)-based reward shaping, and parallel execution. We provide front-goal scenarios and an 11-vs-11 full-field benchmark, together with baseline results.

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

Neural ARFIMA model for forecasting BRIC exchange rates with long memory

arXiv:2509.06697v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Exchange rate forecasting remains a challenging problem, particularly for emerging economies, where the observed time series exhibit pronounced long-memory dependence, nonlinear dynamics, and sensitivity to macro-financial drivers. Classical models such as ARFIMA capture long-range persistence but fail to adequately represent nonlinear relationships, while modern machine learning approaches often neglect the underlying long-memory structure in macroeconomic series. To address this gap, we propose a Neural AutoRegressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (NARFIMA) model that integrates ARFIMA-based long-memory modeling with neural networks for nonlinear function approximation, while incorporating exogenous macroeconomic and uncertainty indicators. The framework provides a unified approach for capturing persistence, nonlinear dynamics, and external shocks. We establish asymptotic stationarity of the NARFIMA process and develop conformal prediction intervals for distribution-free uncertainty quantification. Empirical results for BRIC exchange rates show that NARFIMA consistently outperforms a broad range of forecasting benchmarks across multiple horizons, underscoring the importance of explicitly modeling long-memory dependence in exchange rate dynamics. The `narfima' R package provides an implementation of our approach.

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

TivTok: Broadcasting Time-Invariant Tokens for Scalable Video Tokenization

Video tokenization is fundamental to scalable video generation, as the number of tokens directly determines the computational cost and the length of videos that can be modeled. Existing tokenizers mainly improve scalability by compressing videos into fewer tokens, but they often continue to represent persistent content, such as static backgrounds and consistent object appearances, repeatedly across frames and chunks. In this paper, we propose TivTok (Time-Invariant Tokenizer), a reuse-aware video tokenizer that makes persistent information reusable across time. TivTok represents a clip with Time-Invariant (TIV) tokens that encode information shared across frames and Time-Variant (TV) tokens that encode frame-specific residuals. To obtain this factorization, we introduce Scope-Induced Factorization (SIF), which assigns different attention scopes to the two token groups: TIV tokens attend to the full clip, whereas each TV token only accesses its corresponding frame together with the TIV tokens. In the decoder, Invariant Broadcasting (IB) reuses the same TIV tokens across frames and chunks for parallel reconstruction and long-video tokenization. Experiments show that TivTok achieves an rFVD of 12.65 on the standard $16{\times}256{\times}256$ benchmark and improves compression efficiency by 2.91$\times$ for 128-frame videos compared with the evaluated baselines, while using only 1.1\% of the tokens required by downsample-based tokenizers in our evaluation.

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

NetBurst: Event-Centric Forecasting of Bursty, Intermittent Time Series

arXiv:2510.22397v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Network operators monitor their infrastructure by collecting telemetry data such as packet counts, byte rates, or flow volumes, yet answering the questions that effective operations demand – forecasting future load, diagnosing and characterizing anomalies, and searching for and retrieving historical precedents – requires more than raw measurements. Bridging this gap calls for learned representations: compact per-entity summaries that capture temporal dynamics from each entity's univariate time series. Time-series foundation models are the natural starting point, but they are designed for dense, periodic benchmark datasets – the mild statistical regime. However, network telemetry data inhabits the wild regime: operationally relevant events are rare, separated by variable-length stretches of low or no activity (``ebbs''), with intermittent bursts of heavy-tailed extremes (``tides''). We present NetBurst, an event-centric pipeline that collapses ebbs, separates each time series into a stream of burst timings and a stream of burst magnitudes, and learns a single representation serving all three operational tasks. Compared to the strongest competitors among eight baselines – including Amazon's Chronos-2 and Datadog's Toto – and across nine production telemetry configurations, NetBurst reduces median forecasting error by $1.3$–$116\times$ on wild-regime data with a $1.0$–$7.5\times$ better match to the true burst distribution, and matches baselines on mild-regime benchmarks. For characterizing anomalies, NetBurst produces balanced, well-spread clusters that are $16\times$ more describable in operator-familiar terms under a novel interpretability score, and cluster-filtered search delivers $7.5\times$ faster end-to-end retrieval.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

The N-Body Problem: Parallel Execution from Single-Person Egocentric Video

Humans can intuitively parallelise complex activities, but can a model predict this from observing a single person? Given one egocentric video, we introduce the N-Body Problem: predicting how N individuals, can hypothetically perform the same set of tasks. The goal is to maximise speed-up, but naive assignment of video segments to individuals often violates real-world constraints, leading to physically impossible scenarios like two people using the same object or occupying the same space. To quantify this, we formalise the N-Body Problem and propose a suite of metrics to evaluate both performance (speed-up, task coverage) and feasibility (spatial collisions, object conflicts and causal constraints). As a proof of concept, we introduce a structured prompting strategy that guides a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to reason about the 3D environment, object usage, and temporal dependencies, producing a viable parallel execution. On 100 videos from EPIC-Kitchens and HD-EPIC, for $N = 2$, our structured prompt improves action coverage by 45% over a baseline prompt for Gemini 2.5 Pro, while simultaneously slashing collision rates, object and causal conflicts by 51%, 52% and 55% respectively.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The AI Legal Specialist: A Juridically Autonomous Professional Profile for AI Governance

arXiv:2606.12415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid global expansion of artificial intelligence regulation has generated, across multiple jurisdictions, a demand for legal expertise dedicated to AI that the market has addressed in a fragmented manner. Data protection officers extend their remit beyond data protection law; privacy lawyers reposition themselves toward AI; compliance officers add AI chapters to their existing manuals. This paper argues that none of these adaptive responses adequately covers the professional space opened by the emerging global AI regulatory landscape, of which the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) is the most comprehensive instance, alongside the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, the United States executive and sectoral framework, and analogous initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, China, Japan, Singapore, and beyond. A distinct professional profile is required: the AI Legal Specialist, conceived as a jurist – understood broadly to encompass any professional with advanced legal training – operating at the intersection of legal interpretation and AI governance. The profile is juridically autonomous: it derives its existence from the structure of regulatory obligations generated wherever AI is subject to substantive regulation, rather than from any technical standard or the extension of adjacent roles. The paper provides a juridically grounded definition of the profile, argues for its autonomy from adjacent figures and international standards, proposes a reference competence architecture aligned with the European e-Competence Framework (e-CF, EN 16234-1) as a methodological choice, and articulates the conditions for its operational measurement through key performance indicators. The contribution is intended as a foundation for international standardization of the profile and as a reference for practice, curricula, and adoption across jurisdictions.