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

FoleyGenEx: Unified Video-to-Audio Generation with Multi-Modal Control, Temporal Alignment, and Semantic Precision

We present FoleyGenEx, a unified video-to-audio (VTA) framework integrating multi-modal control, frame-level temporal alignment, and fine-grained semantics, enabling synchronized, versatile audio synthesis for diverse tasks. Existing VTA methods either have multi-modal control but weak temporal alignment or strong alignment but lack reference audio conditioning and semantic precision. FoleyGenEx fills this gap via three core innovations: a conditional injection mechanism for audio-controlled VTA and Foley extension, a multi-modal dynamic masking strategy preserving training synchronization, and an adverb-based data augmentation algorithm leveraging signal processing and large language models to enhance textual supervision with nuanced semantics. Experiments on AudioCaps, VGGSound, and Greatest Hits demonstrate its competitive controllable VTA performance against existing methods. Demo samples are available at https://foleygenex.github.io/FoleyGenEx.

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

ReSum: Synergizing LLM Reasoning and Summarization with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.13316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a central technique for improving long-horizon reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing RLVR methods often encourage unnecessarily long reasoning rollouts, which can degrade reasoning coherence and exhaust the available context budget. Existing approaches to long-context organization often depend on external mechanisms to organize rollouts, rather than enabling the model to manage its own reasoning trajectory. To address this limitation, we propose ReSum, a novel RLVR framework that enables LLMs to compress and organize their reasoning trajectories through self-summarization. Our pilot studies show that self-summarization stabilizes generation by lowering token-level entropy, and that introducing a ``summarization'' phrase can substantially mitigate errors propagated from an incorrect rollout prefix. Motivated by these findings, ReSum adopts a summarization-aware adaptive rollout mechanism that contrastively evaluates whether self-summarization benefits the ongoing reasoning process. Specifically, when the model spontaneously triggers self-summarization, ReSum masks the summarization phrase to create a contrastive branch; for non-summarization positions, it instead randomly injects the phrase to create a matched branch. We further design a summarization-aware advantage to enable finer-grained comparison between contrastive rollout trajectories. Extensive experiments show that ReSum improves performance at an average of 4\% while reducing rollout length by 18.6\%.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Offline Preference-Based Trajectory Evaluation

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline evaluation of agentic systems often collapses trajectories to terminal success, discarding information about partial progress and inducing widespread ties, creating substantial statistical inefficiency by reducing effective sample size and weakening the ability to distinguish systems. We propose preference-based trajectory evaluation, which compares trajectories directly through temporal preferences over progress and time-to-return profiles. We find that, across diverse agentic and interactive benchmarks, standard success-based metrics produce tied comparisons on roughly 75% of instances, whereas trajectory-aware preferences reduce ties to roughly 35%, improving discriminative power, ranking stability, and data efficiency. Our results suggest that benchmark saturation, often attributed to poor data collection or problem difficulty, may also be explained by the choice of evaluation measure.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Inferring Cell Fate Trajectories in Time-Resolved Metabolic RNA Labeling data

Single-cell RNA sequencing provides high-resolution snapshots of cellular states but lacks direct information about transcriptional dynamics. Metabolic RNA labeling addresses this limitation by distinguishing newly synthesized RNA, offering insight into the direction of cell state changes, and providing valuable information when attempting to recover the underlying continuous dynamics from static snapshots of cell distributions. However, existing trajectory inference methods do not fully exploit this additional signal. Here, we propose FLOWSATATE, a framework for single-cell trajectory inference that leverages time-resolved RNA labeling within an Optimal Transport setting. We model cell dynamics as a gradient flow in an inferred potential landscape parameterized by a neural network, integrating both total and labeled RNA across time points. The learned potential enables identification of key genes and transcription factors driving cell fate decisions and supports prediction of future cellular states. We benchmark our approach on its ability to generalize unseen data and recover coherent trajectories. We also apply it to study colorectal cancer response to demethylation treatment as well as neuronal differentiation of embryonic stem cells.

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

Enhancing Graph Neural Networks Using Proximity Graphs for Dust Source Emission Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of dust source emissions is critical for mitigating the significant environmental and health hazards posed by dust storms. Traditional forecasting methods often struggle to capture the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of these phenomena. In this paper, we demonstrate that proximity graphs enable Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to effectively model the intricate spatial and temporal relationships between data points. Specifically, we use proximity graphs–such as Delaunay triangulation, Gabriel graph, k-Nearest Neighbor graph, and Yao graph–as the input for GNNs (including GraphSAGE, Graph Convolutional Networks, and Graph Attention Networks) to perform message passing. Our approach highlights the effectiveness of integrating proximity graphs with GNNs for robust and accurate dust source forecasting. To emphasize the importance of proximity graph representations, we compare our method against GNNs using random graphs for message passing. The results show that GNNs with proximity graphs significantly outperform those with random graphs and are also far superior to Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model in dust source emission forecasting.

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

DCP-Prune: Ultra-Low Token Pruning with Distribution Consistency Preservation

Recent vision token pruning methods effectively preserve model performance under moderate token budgets but become unstable under ultra-low token budget. Our analysis shows that as the pruning budget decreases, accuracy degradation is often accompanied by larger feature distribution shifts. Critically, the degree of this distribution shift strongly correlates with performance degradation. To better characterize this phenomenon, we introduce a lightweight distribution consistency metric to estimate the distribution shift between retained and full tokens. Motivated by these observations, we propose a two-stage pruning framework consisting of Anchor-Context Graph Recovery (ACGR) and Text-Aware Token Cluster Selection (TATCS). Specifically, ACGR transfers contextual information before token removal, while TATCS dynamically re-selects representative tokens when severe distribution shift is detected. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior and more stable performance under ultra-low token budget. Notably, it retains 92.1% of the upper-bound average performance on LLaVA-1.5-7B with only 16 visual tokens.

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

On-Policy Distillation with Curriculum Turn-level Guidance for Multi-turn Agents

arXiv:2606.15912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-turn agents that plan, invoke tools, and interact with environments offer a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks, yet their capabilities typically rely on very large models whose inference cost is prohibitive in practice.On-Policy Distillation (OPD) is a natural recipe for transferring such capabilities to smaller students, but we find that it suffers a characteristic failure mode in this setting: small student errors compound across turns and push the trajectory out of the teacher's familiar state distribution, so the teacher's supervision becomes least reliable precisely where the student needs it most.We propose Guided On-Policy Distillation (Guided-OPD), a simple yet effective algorithm that mixes teacher- and student-generated turns within each rollout and schedules the teacher's intervention probability along a curriculum that decays to zero.Strong guidance keeps early trajectories close to the teacher distribution and is then gradually withdrawn to recover the purely on-policy regime used at inference.On ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop, distilling Qwen3 students from a Qwen3-30B-A3B teacher, Guided-OPD improves Score by 21.1\% and Success Rate by 25.5\% over vanilla OPD on average, with larger gains on smaller students.

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

Towards Verifiable Agentic Data Science: Solving Irregular TSQA Via Tool-Grounded Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series data in real-world deployments is overwhelmingly irregular. Observations are asynchronous, missing values are informative rather than random, and sampling frequencies vary across sensors and operational windows. However, existing Time Series Question Answering (TSQA) benchmarks mostly assume regularly sampled inputs, leaving a fundamental gap in understanding how large language models (LLMs) and AI agents perform under irregular conditions. To bridge this gap, we introduce IRTS-ToolBench, a benchmark of 1,700 questions spanning 10 task types across 13 domains. IRTS-ToolBench is designed to be used independently by any researcher working on LLM-based irregular time series analysis, providing standardized inputs and a reproducible evaluation protocol. Code can be found in https://github.com/SanhornC/IRTS-ToolBench.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum gates with parametrically driven multi-qubit couplers

arXiv:2606.14522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superconducting quantum processors could significantly profit from enhanced connectivity together with precise control of interactions and gates between qubits. Here we investigate plaquettes of four qubits that are coupled via a central tunable coupling circuit, so that not only gates between qubits connected by an edge of the plaquette can be executed but also between qubits across the diagonal. By numerically and analytically analyzing parametrically driven processes, we explore $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates between any pair of qubits, also across the diagonal, as well as three-qubit interactions and gates. For experimentally available circuit parameters, we for example find $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates with a gate time of 50 ns and 99.9\% fidelity, which is decreased to 99.4\% if two such gates are executed in parallel on disjoint qubit pairs in the plaquette. For three-qubit gates we find fidelities of 95\% fidelity at a gate time of 200 ns.

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

Learning to Distort: Weakly-Supervised Image Quality Transfer for Prostate DWI Correction

Single-shot echo-planar prostate diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is frequently complicated by geometric distortions, which impact the ability to derive reliable diagnoses from such images. Developing automated correction methods is challenged by the absence of paired distorted and undistorted clinical scans. In this paper, we first propose a novel weakly-supervised image quality transfer (IQT) framework from undistorted to distorted images that utilizes image quality assessment (IQA) signals to supervise the transfer process. Unlike traditional methods that require expensive, voxel-wise paired data or resort to developing unpaired algorithms, our approach utilizes image-level quality labels (here, distorted vs. undistorted) to establish latent quality prototypes within a pre-trained feature space. Recognizing that simulating realistic distortions is more reliable than direct unpaired correction, we describe a weakly-supervised prototype flow matching algorithm to explicitly regularize generative trajectories towards distorted prototypes, producing realistic susceptibility artifacts that mimic clinical degradations. By synthesizing these realistic pairs, we enable a second IQT model to be trained in the forward direction for distortion correction. Experimental results demonstrate that our generated images successfully mimic the diagnostic interference of real-world artifacts, which leads to more capable distortion correction IQT models. In addition to qualitative comparisons, we also conduct exhaustive quantitative evaluations that compare our approach with existing unpaired approaches (e.g., CycleGAN, UNIT-DDPM, and OT-FM) - as either forward or reverse alternatives - by assessing clinical downstream task performance in PI-RADS and Gleason score classification, using both in-distribution and external data sets.

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

AI-enhanced tuning of quantum dot Hamiltonians toward Majorana modes

arXiv:2601.02149v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a neural network-based model capable of learning the broad landscape of working regimes in quantum dot simulators, and using this knowledge to autotune these devices - based on transport measurements - toward obtaining Majorana modes in the structure. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner on synthetic data in the form of conductance maps, using a physics-informed loss that incorporates key properties of Majorana zero modes. We show that, with appropriate training, a deep vision-transformer network can efficiently memorize relation between Hamiltonian parameters and structures on conductance maps and use it to propose parameters update for a quantum dot chain that drive the system toward topological phase. Starting from a broad range of initial detunings in parameter space, a single update step is sufficient to generate nontrivial zero modes. Moreover, by enabling an iterative tuning procedure - where the system acquires updated conductance maps at each step - we demonstrate that the method can address a much larger region of the parameter space.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Comparative Study of Deep Learning Architectures for Multi-Horizon Behavioural Forecasting for Mobile Health

arXiv:2606.14604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wearable devices and smartphones generate rich behavioural time series that can support proactive health interventions, yet systematic comparisons of modern forecasting architectures for these data are lacking. In particular, it remains unclear how models generalise across populations, how different architectures respond to participant-level fine-tuning and how forecasting accuracy degrades across multi-day horizons. We benchmark six deep learning architectures, two zero-shot Foundation Models (FM) and statistical baselines on three public datasets encompassing over 800 participants, reporting per-feature metrics for step counts, screen time and sleep duration across 1-8 day horizons. We further conduct a per-feature personalisation study across all six architectures and assess FM transferability across dataset sizes and temporal granularities. Our key findings are: (i) no single architecture dominates, PatchTST leads among trained models while the three runners-up (TCN, MLP, Transformer) show no meaningful performance difference; (ii) the FM TimesFM matches or exceeds trained models zero-shot, especially in low-data regimes and (iii) participant-level fine-tuning reduces per-feature RMSE by 16-60\%, with sleep benefiting most and step counts least. These results provide practical guidance on architecture selection, FM applicability and personalisation strategies for mobile health forecasting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to jointly evaluate modern deep learning, FMs and personalisation for multi-horizon behavioural forecasting from wearables.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Tight Bounds for Logistic Regression with Large Stepsize Gradient Descent in Low Dimension

arXiv:2602.12471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the optimization problem of minimizing the logistic loss with gradient descent to train a linear model for binary classification with separable data. With a budget of $T$ iterations, it was recently shown that an accelerated $1/T^2$ rate is possible by choosing a large stepsize $\eta = \Theta(\gamma^2 T)$ (where $\gamma$ is the dataset's margin) despite the resulting non-monotonicity of the loss. In this paper, we provide a tighter analysis of gradient descent for this problem when the data is two-dimensional: we show that GD with a sufficiently large learning rate $\eta$ finds a point with loss smaller than $\mathcal{O}(1/(\eta \gamma^2 T))$, as long as $T \geq \Omega(n/\gamma + 1/\gamma^2)$, where $n$ is the dataset size. Our improved rate comes from a tighter bound on the time $\tau$ that it takes for GD to transition from unstable (non-monotonic loss) to stable (monotonic loss), via a fine-grained analysis of the oscillatory dynamics of GD in the subspace orthogonal to the max-margin classifier. We also provide a lower bound of $\tau$ matching our upper bound up to logarithmic factors, showing that our analysis is tight.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Programmable Gauge-Field Textures with Ultracold Atoms in Momentum Space

arXiv:2606.15124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic gauge fields with ultracold atoms offer a route to quantum matter in which electromagnetic environments can be designed rather than merely imposed. While the Harper-Hofstadter model has been realized in several cold-atom systems, existing implementations are largely limited to spatially uniform magnetic fluxes. Here we experimentally realize a highly programmable two-dimensional momentum-state lattice of ultracold atoms with local control over the Peierls phase pattern, enabling direct implementation of Harper-Hofstadter Hamiltonians with tunable and spatially structured synthetic gauge fields. We observe a crossover from ballistic to strongly flux-modified bulk dynamics with suppressed transport. By introducing a synthetic electric field through site-dependent energy gradients, we further demonstrate Hall-type transverse drift arising from the interplay between electric and magnetic fields. In addition, we engineer a synthetic flux domain wall separating regions with opposite magnetic fluxes and observe anisotropic propagation guided along the interface. These results move cold-atom gauge-field engineering from uniform magnetic backgrounds toward designer gauge textures, providing an experimental setting for transport across programmable topological interfaces.

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

From Shield to Target: Denial-of-Service Attacks on LLM-Based Agent Guardrails

arXiv:2606.14517v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based guardrails have emerged as a highly effective defense against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks in autonomous agents. However, we reveal that the very reasoning and task-following capabilities enabling this protection introduce a novel vulnerability: attackers can inject crafted data to trap the guardrail in extended reasoning loops, effectuating a systematic denial-of-service (DoS) attack. To systematically expose this threat, we design a beam-search optimization framework that crafts natural-language payloads to maximize guardrail reasoning length, utilizing an LLM proposer guided by a strategy bank. Based on the observation of guardrail's schema-following nature, we also provide another attack framework driven by mechanism-aware structural mutations with less computational load. The attack efficacy is systematically evaluated in two parts. First, in standalone evaluations, the attack generalizes across diverse guardrail architectures, safety templates, and agent benchmarks. Payloads optimized on a single open-source surrogate successfully transfer to eight leading model backbones (e.g., Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Qwen), achieving a 13–63$\times$ token amplification. Second, in end-to-end real-world agent deployments (web, desktop, code, and multi-agent systems), the attack reveals up to a 148$\times$ latency amplification. We show that a single poisoned document can saturate shared guardrail infrastructures, effectively starving co-located agents and paralyzing the entire system. By uncovering this availability flaw, our work underscores the urgent need to develop cost-bounded, reasoning-robust guardrails.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Programmatic access to ICTV virus taxonomy through a public ontology API

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) is responsible for developing and maintaining a universal virus taxonomy. As the reference framework for organising the viral world, it is essential for virology and related fields. Despite its widespread use in research and public health, programmatic access to ICTV taxonomy has remained limited, posing challenges for integration, versioning, and interoperability across databases and bioinformatics resources requiring up-to-date virus taxonomy. To address this, we developed a public and sustainable solution leveraging ontology-based APIs. Successive ICTV Master Species List (MSL) releases were transformed into a structured ontology and deployed as a unified representation through the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS). The framework also provides ICTV-NCBI mappings and helper libraries for integration into downstream systems. This enables, for the first time, public programmatic retrieval of current and historical virological taxon names, taxonomic relationships, metadata, and persistent identifiers through stable endpoints. More broadly, this work illustrates a general strategy for transforming structured biological datasets into semantically enriched graph resources exposed through scalable public APIs. These developments enhance interoperability, reduce manual curation, and support FAIR-aligned taxonomic data management in virology and pandemic preparedness.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CrossFlow: One-Step Generation Across Latent and Pixel Spaces

Most diffusion and flow-matching generators define the prior, probability path, and prediction target in the same representation space. Latent diffusion improves efficiency by moving this path into an autoencoder latent space, but the final sample is still produced by a separately trained decoder. This separation creates a mismatch: the generator is optimized for latent-space prediction, while final quality depends on how the decoder handles generated latents that may differ from clean encoder outputs. We introduce CrossFlow, a cross-space flow formulation that maps noisy latent inputs directly to pixel-space images. The key technical step is a velocity-free one-step objective: the latent trajectory defines the training path, but the supervised prediction is an image rather than a latent displacement. This lets one model act both as a one-step latent-to-pixel generator and as a decoder replacement for latent diffusion pipelines. On class-conditional ImageNet-1k at $256\times256$, CrossFlow-XL achieves 1.62 FID with one function evaluation. Ablations show that the latent encoder and pixel-space perceptual and adversarial losses are important for fidelity. These results indicate that cross-space flow objectives can combine the efficiency of latent representations with direct pixel-space supervision, without requiring a separate decoder at inference.

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

Hey Chat, Can You Teach Me? Structuring Socratic Dialogue for Human Learning in the Wild

Large language models are now widely used for everyday learning, but the underlying interactions are typically unstructured chats rather than following a curriculum. Unlike formal online learning systems, these interactions carry no prior record of the student, so any estimate of what the student already knows must be inferred from the dialogue itself. We show that this gap is not closed by scaling models alone. Frontier and education-tuned LLMs perform poorly when asked to tutor a student over an extended session, because doing so requires three things at once. The tutor must sequence a curriculum, conduct Socratic dialogue, and infer the student's knowledge state from that dialogue. We propose separating these responsibilities. Given a student query, our system constructs a prerequisite knowledge graph in which subtopics are nodes and dependencies are edges, and frames tutoring as deciding which node to teach next and how many dialogue turns to spend on it before moving on. A lightweight PPO policy handles this sequencing decision, while an LLM conducts the Socratic exchange at the chosen node and returns a signal of student progress. Across held-out STEM and non-STEM topics, our PPO-paired tutor outperforms heuristic baselines, frontier general-purpose models, and a model specialised for Socratic dialogue: on both the rate at which students reach full curriculum mastery and the number of turns required. Explicit curriculum structure delivers gains that scaling the underlying model does not.

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

Functional Gradient Descent with Adaptive Representations

arXiv:2606.16926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Functional optimization problems are typically solved by optimizing the parameters of a fixed representation, such as a neural network, resulting in highly nonconvex losses that complicate both training and theoretical analysis. An interesting alternative is functional gradient descent (FGD), that is, gradient descent directly in function space, which benefits from strong convergence results and admits a clean theory. However, FGD is difficult to implement in practice because functional gradients are infinite-dimensional, and thus cannot be fully computed nor stored in memory. Existing implementations therefore rely on fixed approximations, which introduce approximation error. We propose a new, theoretically-grounded FGD algorithm that adapts the representation of the functional gradients over the course of optimization. By explicitly incorporating this approximation into the analysis, we establish convergence to a stationary point (for smooth losses) and to a global minimizer (under smoothness + a Polyak-Lojasiewicz-type condition) regardless of our approximations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementable FGD method with such guarantees in a general setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on regression, numerical solution of PDEs, and modern computer vision. Across settings, our method consistently outperforms both FGD with fixed approximations and neural network baselines in efficiency and accuracy.

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

MMLongEmbed: Benchmarking Multimodal Embedding Models in Long-Context Scenarios

Recent advancements have significantly expanded the theoretical context windows of Multimodal Embedding Models (MEMs). However, larger context windows do not necessarily translate into effective comprehension and representation of long-context multimodal inputs, which remains a critical bottleneck for real-world deployment. To address the lack of systematic evaluation in this setting, we introduce MMLongEmbed, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating MEMs in long-context scenarios. MMLongEmbed comprises four retrieval tasks spanning multiple context-length ranges, covering text, document, and video modalities. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models, we find that current architectures rely heavily on superficial feature matching and struggle to capture deep semantic and structural dependencies. We further observe that performance degradation varies systematically with context length and key information placement. Moreover, models exhibit substantially different robustness to redundant contextual information across modalities. For reproducibility, the benchmark and code are publicly available.

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

Forecasting Future Behavior as a Learning Task

arXiv:2606.11445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trust in an AI system is often anchored by explanations of how it works, which one then uses to forecast its behavior on new inputs. For large reasoning models (LRMs), this conventional route is particularly difficult to follow: explanation methods for single token generations do not naturally generalize to long trajectories, and the trajectories themselves are often not faithful when read as natural language. We propose an alternative that bypasses the explanation step: treat behavior forecasting as a learnable task and train Behavior Forecasters that operates on a single reasoning trajectory to make the same forecasts one would typically seek from an explanation. The forecaster's training data is obtained by querying the LRM with no human annotation, and its inference is done in a single forward pass. We instantiate this approach on two tasks: how likely the LRM is to repeat its answer on re-runs, and how removing parts of the input changes its answer. We evaluate this approach on both tasks across three diverse reasoning datasets and find that trained Behavior Forecasters are more accurate than GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus-4.6 reading the same trajectories as naive readers, at a small fraction of their inference cost. We find that fine-tuning the backbone end-to-end and initializing it from the target LRM are each necessary for strong performance. These results show that the reasoning trajectory carries information about the LRM's future behavior that goes beyond what naive reading conveys.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Judging Against the Reference: Uncovering Knowledge-Driven Failures in LLM-Judges on QA Evaluation

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic judges for question answering (QA) and other reference-conditioned evaluation tasks, little is known about their ability to adhere to a provided reference. We identify a critical failure mode of such reference-based LLM QA evaluation: when the provided reference conflicts with the judge model's parametric knowledge, the resulting scores become unreliable, substantially degrading evaluation fidelity. To study this phenomenon systematically, we introduce a controlled swapped-reference QA framework that induces reference-belief conflicts. Specifically, we replace the reference answer with an incorrect entity and construct diverse pairings of original and swapped references with correspondingly aligned candidate answers. Surprisingly, grading reliability drops sharply under swapped references across a broad set of judge models. We empirically show that this vulnerability is driven by judges' over-reliance on parametric knowledge, leading judges to disregard the given reference under conflict. Finally, we find that this failure persists under common prompt-based mitigation strategies, highlighting a fundamental limitation of LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and motivating reference-based protocols that enforce stronger adherence to the provided reference.

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

Interpretable Alzheimer's Diagnosis via Multimodal Fusion of Regional Brain Experts

Accurate and early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is critical for effective intervention and requires integrating complementary information from multimodal neuroimaging data. However, conventional fusion approaches often rely on simple concatenation of features, which cannot adaptively balance the contributions of biomarkers such as amyloid PET and MRI across brain regions. In this work, we propose MREF-AD, a Multimodal Regional Expert Fusion model for AD diagnosis. It is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that models mesoscopic brain regions within each modality as independent experts and employs a gating network to learn subject-specific fusion weights. Utilizing tabular neuroimaging and demographic information from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), MREF-AD achieves competitive performance over strong classic and deep baselines while providing interpretable, modality- and region-level insight into how structural and molecular imaging jointly contribute to AD diagnosis. The source code is available at https://github.com/PennShenLab/mref-ad.

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

YTClickbait21K: Human-Annotated Multimodal Dataset for YouTube Clickbait Detection Across Diverse Channels and Content Categories

Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.

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

ViT-FREE: Efficient Face Recognition via Early Exiting and Synthetic Adaptation

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant attention in computer vision and shown strong potential for face recognition (FR). However, their high computational cost makes deployment on resource-constrained devices challenging, motivating the need for methods that balance efficiency and accuracy. In this work, we investigate early exiting in pretrained ViTs as a simple yet effective training-free strategy for efficient FR inference. Leveraging the uniform feature dimensionality across transformer encoder blocks, we introduce ViT-FREE, a multi-exit framework that enables face verification directly from intermediate representations without modifying or retraining the backbone model, and thus, reducing inference cost. Empirically, we show that patch embeddings and attention maps evolve progressively across depth, exhibiting high similarity between consecutive ViT blocks and increasing alignment with the final representation. This indicates gradual feature refinement and attention convergence, suggesting that intermediate layers already provide stable and discriminative representations suitable for early exiting. Through extensive experiments on multiple FR benchmarks, we systematically analyze the accuracy-efficiency trade-off across exit depths. Our results demonstrate that later exits achieve a highly favorable balance, with exiting at layer 10 yielding up to a 20% speedup while incurring only a 1.5 drop in verification performance on benchmarks such as IJB-C. Also, we propose ViT-FREE_FT, a lightweight exit-specific fine-tuning strategy that adapts only the projection layers using a small synthetic dataset while keeping the transformer backbone frozen. This approach improves the performance of shallow exits while preserving the efficiency benefits and leaving deeper exits largely unaffected.