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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Hybrid refinery process turns plant material into industrially important chemical

An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals. An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

LOKI: Memory-Free Null-Space Constrained Lifelong Knowledge Editing

arXiv:2606.19679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lifelong knowledge editing aims to efficiently and sequentially update language models over time, as new knowledge becomes available or when the model makes mistakes, while preserving acceptable performance on past knowledge. One unresolved challenge is that existing methods modify a fixed set of layers for all new knowledge samples, reducing flexibility and increasing catastrophic forgetting. Another is requiring access to previous knowledge and extensive pre-processing to obtain data statistics. To address these challenges, we introduce LOKI, a novel approach that uses dynamic layer selection based on the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion and projects gradient updates onto the null-space of the model weights, bypassing the requirement for previous knowledge access. We show that LOKI achieves superior performance to existing approaches across a wide variety of experiments, achieving up to a 14\% improvement in average accuracy.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Online Convex Optimization with Sublinear Noisy Probes

arXiv:2606.14640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) over a convex set $K\subseteq \mathbb R^d$, where in each round $t$ the learner selects $x_t\in K$ and then observes a convex loss $f_t:K\to[0,1]$, with the goal of minimizing regret to the best fixed decision in hindsight. We introduce a unified probing model that generalizes two recent lines of work: sublinear best-expert queries in the experts setting, and pairwise (comparison-based) feedback available every round in OCO. In our framework, the learner has a budget of $k\le T$ pairwise probes; on a probed round it may query two points and learn which one has smaller loss. Our main result shows that even a sublinear and noisy probe budget can provably improve worst-case regret in the full feedback OCO regime. With $k$ $\delta$-noisy pairwise probes, we obtain: $ Reg_T \le O\left(\min\left\{\sqrt{dT\ln T},\; \frac{dT\ln T}{k|1-2\delta|}\right\}\right) $, which is tight (up to logarithmic factors in $T$) across $T$, $k$ and $\delta$. Specifically regarding the noise parameter $\delta \in [0,1]$, the regret guarantee smoothly degrades as the oracle response approaches a coin flip, i.e., $\delta$ is close to $\frac{1}{2}$. When applying the same techniques to a finite $K$ for the prediction with $d$ experts setting, the resulting rates are instead completely tight in all parameters, including $d$. Our analysis gives a streamlined treatment of pairwise probing in OCO by quantifying the benefit of probing via a variance reduction effect, combined with a second-order (variance-based) analysis of Continuous Exponential Weights.

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

The Circumplex Degeneracy Behind the Rare-Class Limit in Affect Recognition

In-the-wild expression recognition persistently fails on a few rare emotions, and the standard explanation is class imbalance. Through a controlled multi-task study on two benchmarks, we show the failure is instead a property of affect geometry: the rare classes are degenerate on Russell's circumplex, and that degeneracy bounds what any loss or cost can achieve. Our instrument is a circumplex-cost optimal-transport term that prices expression confusions by their valence-arousal distance. The term improves the official score and expression macro-F1, but a control most studies omit shows the gain is not geometric: a uniform cost, equivalent to a generic confidence penalty, matches it on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.625) and significantly exceeds it on AffectNet (+0.057 over base, larger than the circumplex). What the geometry reshapes is the structure of the errors, making them affectively nearer the truth on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.031 against the uniform control), an effect that does not survive on AffectNet, where a visual confound at the far corner of the circumplex overwhelms it. The rare-class failure, by contrast, is stable across both datasets we examine: the degenerate pairs (anger-fear on Aff-Wild2, anger-contempt on AffectNet) resist frequency-based interventions, the transport term, and an action-unit-augmented cost built specifically to separate them. We conclude that progress on rare expressions requires representations that distinguish the classes, not supervision that reprices their confusions, and we provide the controls and metrics needed to tell the two apart.

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

HilDA: Hierarchical Distillation with Diffusion for Advancing Self-Supervised LiDAR Pre-trainin

arXiv:2606.20189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD). However, current approaches typically treat VFMs as black-box teachers, relying exclusively on frame-wise feature similarity. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the teacher's layer-wise semantic structure and global context, as well as the rich spatiotemporal information inherent in LiDAR sequences. We propose HilDA, a self-supervised pretraining framework for LiDAR backbones that better captures the semantic what and geometric where needed for driving tasks. HilDA combines hierarchical distillation comprising multi-layer distillation for progressive semantic alignment and global context distillation for scene-level semantics, with a temporal occupancy diffusion objective promoting spatiotemporal consistency. Models pre-trained with HilDA achieve state-of-the-art results on cross-modal distillation benchmarks and outperform models trained via prior distillation approaches on 3D object detection, scene flow, and semantic occupancy prediction. Code available at: https://maxiuw.github.io/hilda.

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

SMSR: Certified Defence Against Runtime Memory Poisoning in Persistent LLM Agent Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.12703v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) agents increasingly run with persistent memory that accumulates across user sessions. This creates a new attack surface: an adversary interacting only through normal channels can inject crafted memories that, once retrieved, steer the agent's responses for future users, without touching model weights or code. We call this Multi-Session Memory Poisoning (MSMP) and show that no existing defence certifies against it; static-corpus defences (RobustRAG, ReliabilityRAG) assume a fixed knowledge base, and heuristic filters are bypassed by fluent enterprise-style text. We present Signed Memory with Smoothed Retrieval (SMSR), the first defence with a certified robustness bound for this setting. Component 1 adds HMAC-SHA256 provenance at write time, blocking unsigned injection. Component 2 applies randomised memory ablation with verdict-based majority voting at query time, bounding the influence of authenticated adversaries. We prove that no provenance-free retrieval-time filter can certify against adaptive injection, derive a hypergeometric certificate for Component 2, and formalise the Consistent Minority Effect, whereby a consistent adversarial answer wins string-based voting as a numerical minority while verdict-based voting removes it. Across 15 enterprise scenarios (3,150 repeated trials), Component 1 cuts attack success from 93-100% to 0% for all unsigned variants. For an authenticated adversary with a single injection, Component 2 holds success to 8.0% (95% CI [5.8, 10.9], n=450), below the certified worst case. In an end-to-end query-only attack where the agent itself writes the poison rather than it being pre-seeded, SMSR reduces success from 65.3% to 5.3% (n=150, non-overlapping CIs) on a live agent stack. Clean-query utility is 90% (Component 1) and 85% (combined).

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Dynamic Free-Rider Detection in Federated Learning via Simulated Attack Patterns

arXiv:2604.04611v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model by aggregating local updates without sharing private data. However, FL often faces the challenge of free-riders, clients who submit fake model parameters without performing actual training to obtain the global model without contributing. Chen et al. proposed a free-rider detection method based on the weight evolving frequency (WEF) of model parameters. This detection approach is a leading candidate for practical free-rider detection methods, as it requires neither a proxy dataset nor pre-training. Nevertheless, it struggles to detect ``dynamic'' free-riders who behave honestly in early rounds and later switch to free-riding, particularly under global-model-mimicking attacks such as the delta weight attack and our newly proposed adaptive WEF-camouflage attack. In this paper, we propose a novel detection method S2-WEF that simulates the WEF patterns of potential global-model-based attacks on the server side using previously broadcasted global models, and identifies clients whose submitted WEF patterns resemble the simulated ones. To handle a variety of free-rider attack strategies, S2-WEF further combines this simulation-based similarity score with a deviation score computed from mutual comparisons among submitted WEFs, and separates benign and free-rider clients by two-dimensional clustering and per-score classification. This method enables dynamic detection of clients that transition into free-riders during training without proxy datasets or pre-training. We conduct extensive experiments across three datasets and five attack types, demonstrating that S2-WEF achieves higher robustness than existing approaches.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Super-Arrhenius relaxation of the triangular plaquette model in any dimension

arXiv:2606.16259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consider the following plaquette model from statistical physics: a lamp lies at every vertex of the triangular lattice and a switch lies at every even vertex of the (bipartite) dual hexagonal lattice. Each switch toggles the three lamps on its face. The energy of a configuration is the number of ON lamps. For the Glauber dynamics associated with the Gibbs measure defined by this Hamiltonian at any inverse temperature $\beta>0$, we show that, in any dimension $d\ge 2$, the infinite volume relaxation time satisfies \[e^{\beta^2/C}/C \le T_{\mathrm{rel}}\le Ce^{e^{C\beta}}\] for some $C>0$. Our result entails that the Gibbs measure is unique. The $e^{\beta^2}$ scaling was conjectured by Newman and Moore in 1999 and matches the behaviour of supercritical rooted kinetically constrained models such as the East model, thus recovering fragile glass phenomenology in the absence of kinetic constraints. More precisely, we show that, on a torus of side length $2^k$, when $\beta\to\infty$ and $k/\beta\to0$, we have $T_{\mathrm{rel}}=e^{2\beta k(1+o(1))}$. Quite surprisingly, however, we also prove that, on non-periodic finite domains of size $n\le e^{\beta/C}$ for large $C>0$, we have the much larger asymptotics $\ln T_{\mathrm{rel}}=\beta n^{\Theta(1)}$. The main ingredients of the proofs are new results in extremal and enumerative combinatorics and rely on renormalisation ideas for the dynamics and its groundstates also known as the Ledrappier subshift. We note consequences of our results to geometric group theory (more precisely to the complexity of the word problem for the Baumslag finitely presented group) and to ergodic theory.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Position: Coding Benchmarks Are Misaligned with Agentic Software Engineering

Coding agents have become a major mode of software engineering, but the benchmarks we use to compare them were designed in a pre-agent era: they collapse model, harness, and environment into a single end-to-end score, typically computed against one reference solution, with no component-level signal for iteration. We argue that current coding benchmarks are misaligned with agentic software engineering. A coding agent in practice is not a model: it is a system harness – a composite of models, harnesses, contexts, environments, and feedback signals, any one of which can move the benchmark score by margins comparable to those between adjacent model generations. We discuss three symptoms: (i) benchmark scores conflate the model with the rest of the harness; (ii) grading against a single reference solution penalises equally valid alternatives; and (iii) the absence of signal at the level of individual harness components makes the end-to-end system score difficult to iterate on.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Low-Latency Real-Time Audio Game Commentary System via LLM-Based Parallel Text Generation

We present a low-latency real-time audio game commentary system that generates spoken commentary directly from live gameplay video. In this end-to-end setting, a key bottleneck is accumulated waiting time; conventional pipelines capture frames, generate text, and synthesize speech sequentially for each utterance, and do not request the next generation until speech playback has completed. This strict sequentiality causes long and unnatural silence between utterances. To address this latency bottleneck, our system runs text generation in parallel with speech playback and buffers multiple candidate utterances ahead of time, enabling immediate synthesis at playback boundaries. Experiments on fast-paced game videos show that our parallel design reduces the mean inter-utterance silence from 9.6 seconds to 0.3 seconds compared to sequential baselines. It also improves similarity to professional speaking–silence timing patterns by over 40 %, and a user study with 120 experienced game players confirms significantly improved perceived speaking rhythm. Our demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/pmrRUlvav8M.

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

Anatomy of Post-Training: Using Interpretability to Characterize Data and Shape the Learning Signal

arXiv:2606.12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model post-training is the main stage at which model behavior is shaped, yet it still largely involves optimization of scalar rewards that summarize diverse desiderata. This abstraction gives practitioners little visibility into what their data actually teaches models, allowing spurious correlations to be learned by a model and inducing undesirable behaviors such as over-stylization and sycophancy. To address this problem, we ask: can we inspect a preference dataset before optimization and decide, at the level of concepts, which behaviors a model should be allowed to learn? Motivated by this, we introduce a data-centric post-training pipeline that uses interpretability protocols to develop statistical hypotheses for the latent concepts separating preferred from dispreferred generations, making them explicit for fine-grained user feedback. Building on this view, we unify several interpretability-based training protocols as ways of shaping rewards via feature or data interventions. Empirically, we show that our pipeline diagnoses undesirable signals in existing preference data, mitigates off-target learning, and can also help amplify or shape desired properties such as safeguards and model personality. More broadly, our results suggest that interpretability can turn post-training from optimizing opaque proxy rewards into a process of auditing and sculpting the learning signal itself.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-induced shallow circuits and absence of barren plateaus

arXiv:2403.13927v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by realistic hardware considerations of the pre-fault-tolerant era, we comprehensively study the impact of uncorrected noise on quantum circuits. We first show that in the task of estimating observable expectation values any noise truncates most quantum circuits to effectively logarithmic depth. We then prove that quantum circuits under any non-unital noise do not exhibit barren plateaus for cost functions composed of local observables. However, by using the effective shallowness, we also design an efficient classical algorithm to estimate observable expectation values within any constant additive accuracy, with high probability over the choice of the circuit, in any circuit architecture. Taken together, our results establish that, unless we carefully engineer quantum circuits to take advantage of the noise, noisy quantum circuits are unlikely to offer an advantage over shallow ones for algorithms that output observable expectation value estimates, such as many variational quantum machine learning proposals.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Early-life nutritional environment is associated with late-life cognition in the Health and Retirement Study, a pellagra epidemic natural experiment

Early-life exposures are important to several late-life health outcomes. We sought to study the effect of an in utero nutritional environment and its interaction with Alzheimer's disease (AD) genetic risk on late-life cognitive function. We used a natural experiment created by the pellagra epidemic, a nutritional disease caused by a vitamin B3 deficiency, to evaluate the association between in utero pellagra epidemic exposure and late-life cognitive function in the Health and Retirement Study (N = 18,285). We also evaluated whether the in utero exposure could modify the AD polygenic score's (PGS) effect on cognition. In utero pellagra epidemic exposure was significantly associated with cognition ({beta} = -0.025). However, these effects were not isolated to the prenatal period as exposure during childhood periods also had an effect. The interaction between the in utero exposure and the AD PGS was significant, where the genetic effect on cognition was amplified with increasing (progressively worse) in utero exposure levels. These associations imply that the early-life nutritional environment affects late-life cognitive function and that these effects can modify genetic risk.

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

Temporal2Seq: A Unified Framework for Temporal Video Understanding Tasks

With the development of video understanding, there is a proliferation of tasks for clip-level temporal video analysis, including temporal action detection (TAD), temporal action segmentation (TAS), and generic event boundary detection (GEBD). While task-specific video understanding models have exhibited outstanding performance in each task, there remains a dearth of a unified framework capable of simultaneously addressing multiple tasks, which is a promising direction for the next generation of AI. To this end, in this paper, we propose a single unified framework, coined as Temporal2Seq, to formulate the output of these temporal video understanding tasks as a sequence of discrete tokens. With this unified token representation, Temporal2Seq can train a generalist model within a single architecture on different video understanding tasks. In the absence of multi-task learning (MTL) benchmarks, we compile a comprehensive co-training dataset by borrowing the datasets from TAD, TAS, and GEBD tasks. We evaluate our Temporal2Seq generalist model on the corresponding test sets of three tasks, demonstrating that Temporal2Seq can produce reasonable results on various tasks and achieve advantages compared with single-task training on this framework. We also investigate the generalization performance of our generalist model on new datasets from different tasks, which yields superior performance to the specific model.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Reservoir-controlled electromagnetically induced gratings in a weakly driven two-level medium

arXiv:2606.13085v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We theoretically investigate the transmission and diffraction of a weak probe field from an electromagnetically induced grating formed in a weakly driven two-level medium coupled to engineered quantum reservoirs. Using a perturbative solution of the optical Bloch equations in the weak-driving regime, we analyze how normal-vacuum, thermal, and broadband squeezed-vacuum environments modify the probe susceptibility and consequently reshape both the spatial transmission function and the far-field diffraction patterns. We show that reservoir statistics have a pronounced impact on the diffraction response by altering the amplitude and phase of the induced grating. Thermal reservoirs enhance the transmission modulation and increase the intensity of the dominant diffraction orders, whereas squeezed-vacuum reservoirs generate strongly phase-sensitive modifications that selectively redistribute optical power among diffraction channels. We further demonstrate that the detuning between the squeezed reservoir and the driving field provides an efficient mechanism for controlling diffraction directionality, leading to substantial amplification of selected angular orders. In two-dimensional geometries, squeezed-vacuum correlations produce highly structured phase landscapes and strongly anisotropic diffraction patterns, enabling directional enhancement of specific diffraction channels while suppressing others. These results establish reservoir engineering as a versatile approach for controlling transmission, diffraction efficiency, and angular selectivity in minimal two-level systems, with potential applications in programmable photonic devices, beam steering, and quantum optical platforms.

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

Tyler: Typed Latent Reasoning for Language Models – When to Think, What to Compute, and How Much to Allocate

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by externalizing intermediate computation as discrete text tokens, but this textual interface also introduces redundancy and inference overhead. Latent reasoning offers a promising alternative by carrying part of the computation in continuous representations. However, existing methods typically predefine when latent computation is invoked and how it is allocated during decoding, leaving a key problem unresolved: when to invoke latent computation, what type of computation to perform, and how much budget to allocate. We propose Typed Latent Reasoning (Tyler), a typed and budget-aware framework for latent reasoning during autoregressive decoding. Tyler learns a policy that, at each decoding step, chooses between emitting a text token and switching to a latent computation module specialized for a particular reasoning function. Once invoked, an operator maps the current reasoning state into latent tokens that support global planning, local state updates, or reusable procedural abstraction. Across extensive experiments on three backbone LLMs, Tyler improves accuracy by up to 14.49 points over CoT and by up to 4.30 points over the strongest competing baseline. It further generalizes across diverse reasoning domains and achieves the best final-stage performance with the lowest forgetting.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

TENSO: Software Package for Numerically Exact Open Quantum Dynamics Based on Efficient Tree Tensor Network Decomposition of the Hierarchical Equations of Motion

arXiv:2603.17711v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TENSO is a versatile and powerful open-source software package for numerically exact simulations of the dynamics of quantum systems immersed in structured thermal environments. It is based on a tree tensor network decomposition of the hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM) that efficiently curbs its curse of dimensionality with bath complexity. As such, TENSO enables exact non-Markovian open quantum dynamics simulations even with complex environments typical of chemistry and quantum information science. TENSO allows for time-dependent drive in the system, and for non-commuting fluctuations. More generally, TENSO efficiently propagates the dynamics for any method with a generator of the dynamics that can be expressed in a sum-of-products form, including the HEOM and multi-layer multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree methods. TENSO enables simulations using tensor trees and trains of arbitrary order, and implements three propagation strategies for the coupled master equations; two fixed-rank methods that require a constant memory footprint during the dynamics and one adaptive rank method with a variable memory footprint controlled by the target level of computational error. In contrast to the accompanying theory and algorithmic paper [J. Chem. Phys. 163, 104109 (2025)] the focus here is on the practical usage and applications of TENSO with underlying theoretical concepts introduced only as needed.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

ScoreGate: Adaptive Chunk Selection for Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Dual-Score Statistical Fusion

Fixed-cardinality retrieval injects a constant top-K chunks into the generator regardless of query complexity, causing over-retrieval for narrow queries and under-retrieval for compositional ones. We describe ScoreGate, a lightweight score-space decision mechanism that controls retrieval cardinality at inference time using two scores already produced by the standard pipeline: bi-encoder similarity s_i and cross-encoder reranker score r_i, with no additional model inference calls required. Its core insight is that cross-encoder affirmation can rescue semantically relevant chunks that bi-encoder retrieval ranks poorly due to vocabulary mismatch – a failure mode unaddressed by fixed-K or single-score thresholding. On MS MARCO (200 dev queries), ScoreGate achieves MRR@10 = 0.401 with 35% fewer retained chunks than Standard Top-K. On an internal benchmark (n=300, Fleiss' kappa=0.87), ScoreGate observed zero false positives (95% CI [96.4%, 100%]) at 97.77-99.34% recall, with 34.8% fewer tokens per query and only 31ms added latency. Results on both MS MARCO and real-world production traffic suggest that adaptive retrieval cardinality can improve retrieval efficiency without degrading retrieval quality.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Higher order PCA-like rotation-invariant features for detailed shape descriptors modulo rotation

作者:

PCA can be used for rotation invariant features, describing a shape with its $p_{ab}=E[(x_i-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])]$ covariance matrix approximating shape by ellipsoid, allowing for rotation invariants like its traces of powers. However, real shapes are usually much more complicated, hence there is proposed its extension to e.g. $p_{abc}=E[(x_a-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])(x_c-E[x_c])]$ order-3 or higher tensors describing central moments, or polynomial times Gaussian allowing decodable shape descriptors of arbitrarily high accuracy, and their analogous rotation invariants. Its practical applications could be rotation-invariant features to include shape modulo rotation e.g. for molecular shape descriptors, or for up to rotation object recognition in 2D images/3D scans maybe also for 3D scene understanding, or shape similarity metric allowing inexpensive comparison of objects modulo rotation avoiding costly optimization over rotations.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

A Context-Aware Dataset for Stance Detection in Bioethical Controversies on Reddit

Bioethical debates increasingly unfold on social media, yet stance detection research lacks large-scale, domain-specific resources for modeling such context-dependent discourse. We present BioStance, a context-aware dataset of 39,600 annotated Post-Comment pairs from Reddit bioethical discussions. BioStance covers six controversial targets across three dimensions of bioethical controversy: fundamental value conflicts, individual liberty versus collective responsibility, and technological uncertainty. Each instance preserves hierarchical conversational context and is labeled by three independent annotators using a three-class stance scheme: Favor, Against, and None. The annotations achieve a mean Krippendorff's $\alpha$ of 0.82, indicating substantial reliability. By combining thematic diversity, conversational structure, and high-quality human annotation, BioStance supports research on context-aware stance detection, argument mining, and computational analysis of bioethical discourse.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Universality in the target arrival statistics of non-conservative search processes

arXiv:2606.16025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic search processes in which searchers are continuously introduced to and removed from a target search domain are fundamental to a wide class of physical and artificial systems. The theory of such non-conservative search processes is, however, much less developed than for search processes with a fixed number of particles. Here we exploit a natural mapping between non-conservative stochastic search and queueing theory to derive the full time-dependent distribution of target arrivals under minimal assumptions on the underlying search process. Remarkably, we find that the steady-state inter-arrival time distribution is exactly exponential, regardless of the details of the search process, showing a robust universality that emerges directly from the queueing framework. Thus, counterintuitively, the arrival statistics of a non-conservative search process are much simpler than sequential search-and-capture processes involving a fixed number of searchers. This has major implications for target resource accumulation, where the delivery of resources is counter-balanced by their downstream consumption.

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

ALIGNBEAM : Inference-Time Alignment Transfer via Cross-Vocabulary Logit Mixing

Domain fine-tuning degrades the safety of large language models: fine-tuned specialists readily comply with harmful prompts framed in domain language. Existing inference-time defenses that mix logits from a safe anchor model require both models to share a vocabulary, which rules them out for the cross-family specialists where safety is most degraded. We present ALIGNBEAM, a training-free method that lifts this restriction by translating anchor logits into the target model's vocabulary token-by-token at each decoding step; a small LLM judge then selects the safest among K candidate continuations. No weights are changed, and the safety-utility trade-off can be tuned at deployment without retraining. Across both cross-vocabulary and same-vocabulary evaluation pairs, ALIGNBEAM substantially raises refusal on adversarial benchmarks while keeping task accuracy and inference overhead within practical bounds. The results show that safety alignment can be transferred between model families at inference time, without touching either model's weights.

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

PromptShift-CRC: Drift-Aware Conformal Risk Control for Foundation Models Under Prompt and Domain Shift

arXiv:2606.15964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are now used in settings where the prompts they receive can change quickly. Users change, topics change, policies change, and the model may suddenly face a kind of request that was rare in the calibration data. This makes fixed calibration risky. Conformal prediction and conformal risk control give model-agnostic ways to control error, but they work best when the calibration data still look like the future data. This paper develops PromptShift CRC, a drift-aware conformal risk control method for foundation-model outputs under prompt and domain shift. The method embeds prompts and responses, measures how far the current prompt stream has moved from the calibration pool, gives more weight to relevant or recent calibration examples, and updates the risk level online after observed violations. It reports three practical diagnostics: realized risk error, prompt drift, and effective calibration size. We give conditions under which the method controls risk up to terms for distribution mismatch and weighted quantile uncertainty. In a synthetic prompt-shift benchmark, static conformal risk control fails sharply after drift, while PromptShift-CRC gives the best coverage among the adaptive baselines considered. We then evaluate the same calibration layer on public benchmark derived streams for question answering, toxicity, summarization factuality, and long-context hallucination risk

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

VitalAgent: A Tool-Augmented Agent for Reactive and Proactive Physiological Monitoring over Wearable Health Data

arXiv:2605.29483v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Wearable devices enable continuous monitoring of physiological signals such as ECG and PPG, but existing mHealth systems are largely limited to task-specific prediction pipelines or reactive question answering over static summaries. They lack the ability to support temporal reasoning, persistent physiological context, and proactive monitoring over long-term signal streams. We propose VitalAgent, a tool-augmented agentic framework for ECG/PPG-based mHealth that supports both reactive question answering and proactive monitoring. VitalAgent is built on a longitudinal physiological memory and a tool-augmented reasoning interface that enables dynamic computation over raw signals. We further introduce VitalBench, a longitudinal physiological monitoring benchmark dataset comprising 1,862 QA pairs for reactive question answering and 90.2 hours of continuous ECG/PPG recordings for proactive monitoring, covering cardiac, physical activity, and stress-related tasks. Experiments demonstrate that VitalAgent achieves over 25% improvement over prompt-based and ReAct baselines in reactive evaluation and supports proactive alert monitoring over long-term physiological signals, highlighting the importance of dynamic tool use and long-term physiological monitoring.