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

RankVR: Low-Rank Structure Perception and Value Recalibration for Robust Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) constitutes a pivotal paradigm requiring models to perform joint reasoning on reference images and modification texts. However, the prevalence of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) in large-scale datasets severely constrains model performance. Existing denoising methods either target binary mismatches or rely on scalar-based point-wise estimation, neglecting rich global structural correlations among sample populations and dynamic value variations during training, thereby yielding suboptimal results. This paper identifies two critical unresolved challenges: Global Structural Inconsistency of Semantic Correlations and Hard Sample Discrimination Uncertainty. To address these, we propose RankVR, a framework designed to construct a robust CIR model via global structure consistency and dynamic value perception. Specifically, we introduce the Global Structure Consistency Perception (GSCP) module, which utilizes the Effective Rank of the Correlation Matrix to decouple clean samples from structural noise. By measuring rank difference, GSCP identifies samples disrupting macroscopic semantic symmetry. Furthermore, we develop the Adaptive Semantic Value Calibration (ASVC) module to distinguish high-value hard clean samples. By integrating training potential and reliability, it dynamically quantifies the semantic value of each triplet, ensuring effective utilization of hard samples while suppressing noise characterized by logical conflicts. Extensive experiments on the FashionIQ and CIRR benchmark datasets demonstrate that RankVR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, validating its superior robustness in noisy environments.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Theory of Mind Utility: Formal Specification of a Mentalizing Mechanism

arXiv:2606.12721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inferring others' beliefs requires more than reading surface signals; it requires tracking who told them what, in what order, and how credibly. The Theory of Mind Utility (ToM-U) formalizes this epistemic state inference problem at the computational level of analysis, specifying what mentalizing computes and why without commitment to algorithmic or neural implementation. ToM-U achieves this by constructing Local Epistemic World Models (LEWMs) – directed typed graphs that represent agents, state nodes, and the epistemic relationships among them – and evaluating discrete candidate LEWMs against observed behavior until one achieves sufficient confidence. Five formal definitions specify the LEWM structure, agent node properties including ordered information access history, a bounded proliferation mechanism for recursive mentalizing, three inference procedures, and a residue function that captures the structured trace left by failed mentalizing attempts. ToM-U differs from Bayesian Theory of Mind and adjacent formal accounts, which presuppose rather than derive belief states, and from simulation theory and theory-theory, which lack a formal apparatus for epistemic state inference. The architecture generates directional, falsifiable predictions about mentalizing failure that follow from structural properties of the model rather than auxiliary assumptions, and positions ToM-U as a domain-agnostic mechanism upstream of goal inference and other downstream social cognitive processes.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

When Agent Automation Becomes Profitable: Quantifying and Insuring Autonomous AI Risk through Trace-Economic Underwriting

arXiv:2606.16465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents can now take irreversible actions in operational systems, but agent-caused losses are still not clearly assigned, priced, or transferred. Providers often disclaim consequential damages, users are left with uncompensated losses, and default human review limits the efficiency gains of automation. We ask when autonomous AI deployment can become economically acceptable despite failure risk. Our answer is to quantify risk at the customer-task-trace episode level and transfer it through insurance. Automation is acceptable when its expected benefit exceeds the premium, control cost, and remaining risk. This requires a defined role with bounded permissions and comparable traces. We introduce trace-economic underwriting, which maps tool-use traces to customer exposure and claimable loss, then uses this representation for pricing, control, and risk transfer. It uses deterministic economic labels rather than an LLM judge. In our trace-to-loss testbed, trace-economic pricing reduces pricing MAE from $17.7K to $569 and removes regressive cross-subsidy. A 300-trace expert audit accepts 295 labels unchanged. On 1,000 real SWE-smith traces, trace-conditioned controls reduce CVaR95 by 72%. Theorem~1 gives a finite-sample scope condition. We release code, labels, and audit sheets.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Benchmarking Web Agent Safety under E-commerce Deceptive Interfaces

As autonomous web agents are increasingly deployed to perform real-world tasks, ensuring their safety has become a critical concern. In this work, we study web agent behavior under realistic deceptive interfaces in the e-commerce domain. We introduce WebDecept, a lightweight and configurable plugin framework that enables controlled injection of deceptive interface patterns into existing web environments. Using WebDecept, we instantiate seven deceptive patterns commonly observed on the open web, including targeted advertisements, domain redirection, and shopping manipulation. By injecting these patterns into the frontend during task execution, we perform controlled evaluation of multiple multimodal web agents. Our results show that current web agents are highly susceptible to multiple classes of deceptive interfaces, and that prompt-based constraints are often insufficient to mitigate these failures. We further analyze how the design choices of deceptive patterns influence the success of such manipulations. These findings highlight safety challenges that should be addressed as web agents are scaled toward real-world deployment.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

BadScientist: Can a Research Agent Write Convincing but Unsound Papers that Fool LLM Reviewers?

arXiv:2510.18003v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The convergence of LLM-powered research assistants and AI-based peer review systems creates a critical vulnerability: fully automated publication loops where AI-generated research is evaluated by AI reviewers without human oversight. We investigate this through BadScientist, a framework that evaluates whether fabrication-oriented paper generation agents can deceive multi-model LLM review systems. Our generator employs presentation-manipulation strategies requiring no real experiments. We develop a rigorous evaluation framework with formal error guarantees (concentration bounds and calibration analysis), calibrated on real data. Our results reveal systematic vulnerabilities: fabricated papers achieve acceptance rates up to . Critically, we identify concern-acceptance conflict – reviewers frequently flag integrity issues yet assign acceptance-level scores. Our mitigation strategies show only marginal improvements, with detection accuracy barely exceeding random chance. Despite provably sound aggregation mathematics, integrity checking systematically fails, exposing fundamental limitations in current AI-driven review systems and underscoring the urgent need for defense-in-depth safeguards in scientific publishing.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

The Geometry of Allostery: A Laplacian Minor Hierarchy for Many-Body Protein Communication

Quantifying how cooperative, many-body relationships drive allostery in protein networks remains a major challenge. To address this, we develop the Laplacian minor hierarchy, a mathematical framework that characterizes the geometric invariants of a protein network. Lower-order minors yield standard metrics including the partition function and effective distances, whereas higher-order minors define novel topological measures: cooperation indices, each bounded between zero and one, that characterize pathway correlations at increasing levels of complexity, the third-order minor determines whether allosteric pathways are correlated or uncorrelated, and the fourth-order minor quantifies how distinct pathways communicate through intermediary residues. We apply this framework to analyze the evolutionary adaptation of the PSD95pdz3 domain from Class I to Class II ligand specificity via mutations G330T and H372A. The cooperation index demonstrates a distinct evolutionary hierarchy: the G330T mutation establishes distributed pathway couplings that the H372A mutation subsequently exploits, whereas H372A alone produces minimal global changes. Furthermore, the fourth-order analysis identifies His317 as a critical intermediary node bridging the class-switching (330-372) and class-bridging (330-400) allosteric pathways. These results demonstrate that allosteric dependencies emerge only when mutations accumulate in specific combinations, with a hierarchical organization of pathways structured around position 330 and intermediary nodes His317 and Phe400. Rather than predicting allosteric mechanisms, this framework provides a mechanistic explanation for why and how allostery emerges during protein evolution.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Rare loss-of-function variants in POLD1, PMS1 and FAN1 modify age at onset of motor symptoms in Huntington's disease

Huntington's disease is a rare neurodegenerative disease whose primary risk factors are inherited expansions of a CAG repeat tract in the HTT gene. Somatic expansion of these tracts leads to neuronal toxicity, neuronal death and clinical disease progression. To identify genetic factors with a major impact on disease onset and progression, we genome sequenced 18,825 individuals for the ENROLL-HD study. Our results show rare inactivating mutations in three genes, all involved in DNA damage repair, are major determinants of age of onset for motor symptoms (n=10,610) and other clinical manifestations. Heterozygote carriers of predicted loss-of-function (pLoF) variants in POLD1 and PMS1 developed motor symptoms an average 20 years (n=3; P=1x10-5) and 7 years (n=6; P=2x10-3) later than non-carriers, respectively. Conversely, heterozygote carriers of pLoF variants in FAN1 (n=30) developed symptoms 10 years earlier (P=2x10-10). Our findings highlight therapeutic strategies and help predict age of onset for at-risk individuals.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Neural ensemble Kalman filter: Data assimilation for compressible flows with shocks

arXiv:2602.23461v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) for compressible flows with shocks is challenging because many classical DA methods generate spurious oscillations and nonphysical features near uncertain shocks. We focus here on the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). We show that the poor performance of the EnKF may be attributed to the bimodal forecast distribution that can arise in the vicinity of an uncertain shock location; this violates the assumptions underpinning the EnKF, which assume a forecast which is close to Gaussian. To address this issue we introduce the new neural EnKF. The basic idea is to systematically embed neural function approximations within ensemble DA by mapping the forecast ensemble of shocked flows to the parameter space (weights and biases) of a deep neural network (NN) and to subsequently perform DA in that space. The nonlinear mapping encodes sharp and smooth flow features in an ensemble of NN parameters. Neural EnKF updates are therefore well-behaved only if the NN parameters vary smoothly within the neural representation of the forecast ensemble. We show that such a smooth variation of network parameters can be enforced via physics-informed transfer learning, and demonstrate that in so-doing the neural EnKF avoids the spurious oscillations and nonphysical features that plague the EnKF. The applicability of the neural EnKF is demonstrated through a series of systematic numerical experiments with the inviscid Burgers' equation, the Sod shock tube, and a two-dimensional blast wave.

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

STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module

Channel and spatial attention mechanisms introduced in earlier work enhance the representational capabilities of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but often increase parameter and computational costs. While recent approaches focus solely on efficient feature context modeling for channel attention, we aim to model both channel and spatial attention comprehensively with minimal parameters and reduced computation. Leveraging the principles of relational modeling in graphs, we introduce a constant-parameter module, STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module, which integrates channel and spatial attention to enhance the representation power of CNNs. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a graph-based approach for modeling both channel and spatial attention, utilizing concepts from multi-head graph transformers. Additionally, we introduce Output Guided Pooling (OGP), which efficiently captures spatial context to further enhance spatial attention. We extensively evaluate STEAM for large-scale image classification, object detection and instance segmentation on standard benchmark datasets. STEAM achieves a \(2\%\) increase in accuracy over the standard ResNet-50 model with only a meager increase in GFLOPs. Furthermore, STEAM outperforms the leading modules, ECA and GCT, in terms of accuracy while achieving a threefold reduction in GFLOPs. The code will be made available upon acceptance.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

IdealGPT: Iteratively Decomposing Vision and Language Reasoning via Large Language Models

The field of vision-and-language (VL) understanding has made unprecedented progress with end-to-end large pre-trained VL models (VLMs). However, they still fall short in zero-shot reasoning tasks that require multi-step inferencing. To achieve this goal, previous works resort to a divide-and-conquer pipeline. In this paper, we argue that previous efforts have several inherent shortcomings: 1) They rely on domain-specific sub-question decomposing models. 2) They force models to predict the final answer even if the sub-questions or sub-answers provide insufficient information. We address these limitations via IdealGPT, a framework that iteratively decomposes VL reasoning using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, IdealGPT utilizes an LLM to generate sub-questions, a VLM to provide corresponding sub-answers, and another LLM to reason to achieve the final answer. These three modules perform the divide-and-conquer procedure iteratively until the model is confident about the final answer to the main question. We evaluate IdealGPT on multiple challenging VL reasoning tasks under a zero-shot setting. In particular, our IdealGPT outperforms the best existing GPT-4-like models by an absolute 10% on VCR and 15% on SNLI-VE. Code is available at https://github.com/Hxyou/IdealGPT

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

An Empirical Study of Automating Agent Evaluation

Agent evaluation requires assessing complex multi-step behaviors involving tool use and intermediate reasoning, making it costly and expertise-intensive. A natural question arises: can frontier coding assistants reliably automate this evaluation process? Our study shows that simply prompting coding assistants is insufficient for this task. Without domain-specific evaluation knowledge, frontier coding assistants achieve only a 30% execution success rate and produce over-engineered evaluations averaging 12+ metrics per agent, indicating that strong coding ability does not automatically translate to reliable agent evaluation. We introduce EvalAgent, an AI assistant that automates the end-to-end agent evaluation pipeline. EvalAgent encodes evaluation domain expertise as evaluation skills (procedural instructions, reusable code and templates, and dynamically retrieved API documentation) that compose into a trace-based pipeline producing complete evaluation artifacts including metrics, executable code, and reports. To systematically assess generated evaluations, we introduce a meta-evaluation framework alongside AgentEvalBench, a benchmark comprising 20 agents, each paired with evaluation requirements and test scenarios. We further propose the Eval@1 metric to measure whether generated evaluation code both executes and yields meaningful results on the first run. Our experiments show that EvalAgent produces focused evaluations, improving Eval@1 from 17.5% to 65%, and achieving 79.5% human expert preference over baseline approaches. Further ablation studies show that evaluation skills are critical for handling complex evaluation: removing them causes Eval@1 to drop significantly from 65% to 30%.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Womens intentions and motivations towards health behaviour change before pregnancy: a cross-sectional survey of pregnant women in Australia

Introduction: The preconception period (i.e. the weeks and months before pregnancy) is a critical window during which parental health behaviours can influence pregnancy outcomes and the childs long-term health. Modifiable factors such as nutrition, physical activity, substance use, and environmental exposures play a key role, yet womens ability to adopt and sustain healthy behaviours is shaped by complex psychological, social and environmental influences. This study applies the Theory of Planned Behaviour to identify the beliefs underpinning womens preconception behaviours, with the aim of informing support for effective and sustained health behaviour change. Methods: An Australian national retrospective cross-sectional survey of pregnant women (18-49 years), recruited through social media platforms. The 92-item survey captured respondent socio-demographics, pregnancy status and health conditions, health behaviours, and beliefs regarding preconception health behaviours. Respondents level of pregnancy planning was categorised using the London Measure of Unplanned Pregnancy (LMUP). Items regarding preconception beliefs were structured in accordance with the Theory of Planned Behaviour, with a focus on regular exercise, healthy diet, and alcohol avoidance. These beliefs variables were analysed using structured equation modelling to identify paths between latent variables and the items used to estimate each concept. Results: The study was completed by 430 pregnant women of whom 72.7% had a planned pregnancy. Most had a partner, were university educated and in good health. Structural equation modelling showed intention strongly predicted exercise ({beta}=0.65), healthy diet ({beta}=0.54) and alcohol avoidance ({beta}=0.64). Perceived control and partner norms influenced intentions, whereas health professional norms had limited effect. Positive beliefs were associated with folate supplement use and smoking cessation. Conclusion: These findings highlight intention as a key driver of preconception health behaviours, with perceived control and partner influences playing a more significant role than individual beliefs or health professional input. Effective interventions should therefore address structural barriers and actively involve partners, while respecting womens autonomy. Overall, couples-focused, multi-level strategies are likely essential to support meaningful and sustained preconception health behaviour change.

13.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

DNA polymerization activates RNA cleavage of a reverse transcriptase–like antiviral enzyme | Science

作者: 未知作者

Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) transcribe noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) for antiviral defense, but the mechanisms of ncRNA-independent DRTs remain unclear. In this work, we show that a single DRT4 mediates RNA-targeting antiphage defense by integrating DNA polymerase, exonuclease, and RNA endonuclease activities. First, through an equilibrium between its DNA polymerase and exonuclease activities, DRT4 senses phage infection, as elevated dNTP levels shift the equilibrium toward polymerase activity, thereby promoting protein-primed single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) synthesis. Second, ssDNA of sufficient length, phage DNA-binding proteins, and deoxyguanosine triphosphate collectively activate an unusual RNA endonuclease activity of DRT4, excising 3′–guanosine monophosphate from both phage and host RNA to terminate infection. These findings reveal a distinctive immune strategy combining nucleic acid synthesis and degradation, expanding the functional landscape of DRTs for new DNA- and RNA-processing technologies.

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

ToolMenuBench: Benchmarking Tool-Menu Filtering Strategies for Reliable and Efficient LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.15508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented large language model agents increasingly operate over large tool libraries, but existing evaluations often focus on whether a model can call a tool correctly rather than how the visible tool menu shapes reliability, efficiency, and safety-relevant risk exposure. We introduce ToolMenuBench, a benchmark for evaluating tool-menu construction in multi-step LLM agents. ToolMenuBench varies tool-menu size, distractor type, state-dependent task structure, and risk exposure, and reports both filter-level and downstream agent metrics, including visible-tool count, risky-tool exposure, task success, wrong-tool calls, premature actions, and token usage. In a controlled evaluation across seven model backends, three tool-menu sizes, six filtering methods, and seven evaluation settings, CMTF improves task success from 32.1% under all-tools exposure to 85.7%, while reducing average token usage by roughly 98%. Causal minimal tool filtering achieves the strongest overall tradeoff, reducing visible tools, wrong-tool calls, premature actions, and risky-tool exposure relative to unfiltered exposure, lexical filtering, state-aware filtering, and broader causal-path baselines. ToolMenuBench provides a reusable evaluation framework for studying the agent-interface problem: which tools should be visible, when they should be visible, and under what cost or risk constraints.

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

Revisiting Outage for Edge Inference Systems

arXiv:2504.03686v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One of the key missions of sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks is to deploy large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models at the network edge to provide remote-inference services for edge devices. The resultant platform, known as edge inference, will support a wide range of Internet-of-Things applications, such as autonomous driving, industrial automation, and augmented reality. Given the mission-critical and time-sensitive nature of these tasks, it is essential to design edge inference systems that are both reliable and capable of meeting stringent end-to-end (E2E) latency constraints. Existing studies, which primarily focus on communication reliability as characterized by channel outage probability, may fail to guarantee E2E performance, specifically in terms of E2E inference accuracy and latency. To address this limitation, we propose a theoretical framework that introduces and mathematically characterizes the inference outage (InfOut) probability, which quantifies the likelihood that the E2E inference accuracy falls below a target threshold. Under an E2E latency constraint, this framework establishes a fundamental tradeoff between communication overhead (i.e., uploading more sensor observations) and inference reliability as quantified by the InfOut probability. To find a tractable way to optimize this tradeoff, we derive accurate surrogate functions for InfOut probability by applying a Gaussian approximation to the distribution of the received discriminant gain. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed design over conventional communication-centric approaches in terms of E2E inference reliability.

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

Sign-Rank, Index, and List Replicability: Connections and Separations

arXiv:2606.18236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In learning theory, the sign rank of a binary concept class captures the smallest dimension in which it can be represented by points and halfspaces. Despite tremendous interest, lower bounds on sign rank are notoriously difficult to come by. Two recent approaches to the problem establish lower bounds on sign rank by measures that are easier to analyze: the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index and the list replicability number. We order these measures, showing that the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index is upper-bounded by a linear function of the list replicability number. As a main consequence, we obtain a strong separation between sign rank and $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index, thereby resolving a question of Frick, Hosseini, and Vasileuski. This motivates a thorough study of list replicability, the stronger of the two lower-bounding measures. We establish upper bounds on the list replicability number by two combinatorial measures: height and minimum star number. We also prove a fundamental composition result, showing that the product of two concept classes has list replicability number bounded by the sum of the list replicability numbers of the two classes.

17.
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.

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

HorusEye: Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis

作者:

We introduce HorusEye, Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis. Our investigation followed five stages. The first one is benchmarking RefCOCO-Degraded, a dataset of 15,244 images (3,811 base images x 4 conditions: Clean, Fog, Smoke and Thermal) with systematic visual degradation. Through four research questions, we evaluate multiple VLMs (Gemini, Qwen2-VL, BLIP-2, LLaVA, Kosmos-2) across visual grounding the second stage, language feedback recovery the third one, health VQA tasks the fourth, and hallucination analysis the final stage. Our key finding is that language feedback effectiveness is model-dependent: Gemini achieves +47.3% improvement in thermal conditions through iterative language feedback, while Qwen2-VL shows -5.1% degradation under the same protocol. We also identify the 'Thermal Paradox' where cropping strategies that improve RGB performance catastrophically fail in thermal imagery. Furthermore, BLIP-2 uniquely hallucinates more under degradation, making it unsuitable for emergency deployment

19.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-18

Association between initial benzodiazepine prescribing patterns and time to benzodiazepine discontinuation: A population-based retrospective cohort study

by Nikki Bozinoff, Tanya S. Hauck, Robert A. Kleinman, Matthew E. Sloan, Beth A. Sproule, Simone N. Vigod, Jennifer Wyman, Priscila Pequeno, Tara Gomes Background Long-term benzodiazepine use has been associated with increased risk of morbidity and mortality. Preventing long-term use through safer prescribing practices has received little attention to date. We sought to better understand associations between initial prescription characteristics and duration of benzodiazepine use. Methods and findings This was a retrospective population-based cohort study of 1,820,808 adults in Ontario with incident benzodiazepine prescriptions between January 1, 2013 and December 31, 2020, with follow-up to December 31, 2021. The primary exposure was duration of the index prescription (≤7 days—referent group, 8–14 days, 15–30 days, or >30 days). Secondary exposures were: (a) duration of action of index benzodiazepine(s) prescription (short-acting, long-acting or both); (b) number of benzodiazepine dispensed on index (1 or 2+); and (c) mean daily dose of the index prescription in Diazepam Milligram Equivalents (DMEs). The primary outcome was time to benzodiazepine discontinuation in days. Multivariable models were adjusted for age, sex, anxiety, insomnia, and substance use disorders as well as other important comorbidities and socio-demographic characteristics. The median age at index was 53 years (Interquartile Range (IQR) 38–67), and 62.6% were women. The median time to discontinuation in women was 16 days (IQR: 6–29) while the median time to discontinuation in men was 19 days (IQR: 6–29). Lorazepam was the most commonly prescribed benzodiazepine on index (63.9%), followed by clonazepam (17.3%) and diazepam (5.8%). In multivariable Cox Proportional Hazards Models, longer index prescriptions were associated with a lower likelihood of benzodiazepine discontinuation (adjusted Hazard Ratio (aHR) 0.54 (95% Confidence Interval (CI) [0.54,0.54]) for 8–14 days; aHR 0.26 (95% CI [0.25,0.26] for 15–30 days and aHR 0.14 (95% CI [0.14,0.14]) for >30 days, compared to ≤7 days, respectively). Being prescribed two or more benzodiazepines versus 1 was also associated with a reduced likelihood of discontinuation (aHR 0.59 (95% CI [0.57,0.61])), as was being prescribed long-acting benzodiazepines (aHR 0.80 (95% CI [0.80,0.80])) or a combination of short and long acting benzodiazepine (aHR 0.84 (95% CI [0.80,0.88])) versus short-acting benzodiazepines alone. Mean daily doses of >5 to ≤10 DME and >10 to ≤20 DME were associated with an increased likelihood of discontinuation (aHR 1.03 (95% CI [1.03,1.03]); aHR: 1.03 (95% CI [1.03,1.04])), whereas doses >20 DME were associated with a reduced likelihood of discontinuation (aHR 0.98 (95% CI [0.97,0.98])) compared with ≤5 DME. Findings may be subject to bias from unmeasured confounding. Conclusion This large population-based cohort study found that prescribing shorter courses of benzodiazepines, use of a single benzodiazepine, use of a short-acting agent, were associated with reduced likelihood of long-term benzodiazepine use. Findings suggest that simple changes to prescribing practices could reduce prolonged benzodiazepine use and the morbidity and mortality associated with long-term use of these medications.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Exact Dynamics of Topological Order Across a CDW–SPT Transition

arXiv:2606.11303v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of a one-dimensional interacting system across a transition from a charge-density-wave (CDW) phase to a symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase. Starting from a CDW initial state, we study both sudden quenches and slow ramps into the SPT regime. While the CDW order melts under both protocols, the fate of topological order is sharply different. Following a sudden quench, long-range SPT order does not emerge because the post-quench state contains a finite density of excitations above the topological ground state. In contrast, slow ramps allow the system to follow the instantaneous ground state away from the critical region, enabling the buildup of SPT order with deviations governed by Kibble-Zurek defect production. The dynamics is solvable via a unitary mapping to a quadratic fermionic Hamiltonian, allowing us to compute the Loschmidt echo, correlation functions, and string correlator. The Loschmidt rate function exhibits cusps signaling dynamical quantum phase transitions, while the correlation dynamics reveal the contrasting mechanisms governing quenches and ramps across the transition. These results demonstrate that entering the topological regime is not sufficient for the emergence of topological order; the decisive factor is the suppression of excitation production during the evolution.

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

TokenRatio: Principled Token-Level Preference Optimization via Ratio Matching

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used RL-free method for aligning language models from pairwise preferences, but it models preferences over full sequences even though generation is driven by per-token decisions. Existing token-level extensions typically decompose a sequence-level Bradley-Terry objective across timesteps, leaving per-prefix (state-wise) optimality implicit. We study how to recover token-level preference optimality using only standard sequence-level pairwise comparisons. We introduce Token-level Bregman Preference Optimization (TBPO), which posits a token-level Bradley-Terry preference model over next-token actions conditioned on the prefix, and derive a Bregman-divergence density-ratio matching objective that generalizes the logistic/DPO loss while preserving the optimal policy induced by the token-level model and maintaining DPO-like simplicity. We introduce two instantiations: TBPO-Q, which explicitly learns a lightweight state baseline, and TBPO-A, which removes the baseline through advantage normalization. Across instruction following, helpfulness/harmlessness, and summarization benchmarks, TBPO improves alignment quality and training stability and increases output diversity relative to strong sequence-level and token-level baselines.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Multi-level Analysis of Factors Associated with Student Performance: A Machine Learning Approach to the SAEB Microdata

arXiv:2510.22266v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying the factors that influence student performance in basic education is a central challenge for formulating effective public policies in Brazil. This study introduces a multi-level machine learning approach to classify the proficiency of 9th-grade and high school students using microdata from the System of Assessment of Basic Education (SAEB). Our model uniquely integrates four data sources: student socioeconomic characteristics, teacher professional profiles, school indicators, and principal management profiles. A comparative analysis of four ensemble algorithms confirmed the superiority of a Random Forest model, which achieved 90.2% accuracy and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 96.7%. To move beyond prediction, we applied Explainable AI (XAI) using SHAP, which revealed that the school's average socioeconomic level is the most dominant predictor, demonstrating that systemic factors have a greater impact than individual characteristics in isolation. The primary conclusion is that academic performance is a systemic phenomenon deeply tied to the school's ecosystem. This study provides a data-driven, interpretable tool to inform policies aimed at promoting educational equity by addressing disparities between schools.

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

Send a SCOUT First: Pre-hoc Reasoning for Adaptive Detector Allocation in Prompt-Injection Defense

arXiv:2605.30837v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt-injection detectors are heterogeneous: each is strong on a different slice of attacks, and none is always reliable. Yet existing systems still treat detection as a fixed single-detector pipeline, committing every request to one detector's blind spots. We reframe defense as detector allocation: given a heterogeneous pool, decide per request which detectors to run and whether to escalate to an LLM judge. Our framework SCOUT (Scalable and Controllable Outcome-prediction for Uncertainty-aware Triage) makes this decision dynamic by predicting each detector's per-sample reliability and latency from how it behaved on similar past inputs, and exposes a single safety-utility threshold to the operator (where utility bundles benign-pass rate and wall-clock). To evaluate this setting, we build SCOUT-450, a benchmark that captures the structurally complex, agent-facing injections that older prompt-injection sets under-represent. On SCOUT-450, a safety-oriented operating point reduces attack-success rate by 46% and total wall-clock by 40% relative to an always-on GPT-4o judge, at a 5.1-point benign-utility drop. SCOUT also transfers to three external benchmarks (BIPIA, IPI, and IHEval), improving the safety-utility frontier.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Top-Theta Attention: Sparsifying Transformers by Compensated Thresholding

We present Top-Theta (Top-$\theta$) Attention, a training-free method for sparsifying transformer attention during inference. Our key insight is that static, per-head thresholds can be calibrated to retain the desired constant number of significant elements per attention row. This approach enables content-based sparsity without retraining, and it remains robust across data domains. We further introduce compensation techniques to preserve accuracy under aggressive sparsification, establishing attention thresholding as a practical and principled alternative to top-k attention. We provide extensive evaluation on natural language processing tasks, showing that Top-$\theta$ achieves 3-10x reduction in V-cache usage and up to 10x fewer attention elements during inference while degrading no more than 1% in accuracy.