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) 2026-06-16

FUSE: Quantifying Uncertainty in Vision-Language Models by Bayesian Fusing Epistemic and Aleatoric Uncertainty

Vision-language models (VLMs) are playing an increasingly important role across multiple domains. In many applications, such as robotics, it is crucial to quantify the uncertainty in the output of these models. } We develop FUSE, a probabilistic framework for capturing two complementary sources of uncertainty in vision-language modeling: (i) aleatoric embedding-level uncertainty derived from input data vision-language ambiguity, and (ii) epistemic model-level uncertainty estimated from the semantic response diversity of VLMs. Our approach formulates a Bayesian fusion mechanism that analytically combines these uncertainty sources to produce a scalar measure of uncertainty. This measure can be used to reliably predict the model's output correctness for downstream applications. We demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines and achieves SOTA uncertainty calibration.

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

Effective Dimension Governs Generalization in Quantum Kernel Vision Models

arXiv:2606.20183v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent quantum vision models-quantum vision transformers and quantum convolutional networks-report two striking but unexplained empirical phenomena: (i) ansatze with more, or more uniformly distributed, entanglement generalize better, and (ii) injecting quantum noise can improve test accuracy rather than degrade it. These observations are currently treated as curiosities, discovered by grid search and explained, if at all, by hand. We show that both are manifestations of a single, measurable quantity: the effective dimension $d_eff$ of the (noise-shaped) quantum feature kernel. Working primarily with quantum-kernel vision models-a quantum feature map read out by a kernel classifier-we give a spectral account in which entanglement structure and quantum noise are two knobs that move $d_eff$; in an overfitting regime, contracting $d_eff$ acts as ridge-like regularization. We analyze the mechanism: an exact decomposition of the depolarized kernel $K_p=(1-p)^2K+\tfrac{p(2-p)}{D}\mathbf{1}\mathbf{1}^\top$ with $d_eff(K_p)\to1$, a contraction result (and its boundary) for amplitude damping, a kernel-machine capacity bound, and a capacity/alignment risk decomposition; the monotone contraction operative in our entangled experiments is verified empirically, not proven in general. Along the one-parameter depolarizing family the collapse is instead exact by construction; we use it only to confirm the kernel decomposition to machine precision and at up to $12$ qubits, not as evidence for $d_eff$. Amplitude damping contracts $d_eff$ and lifts test accuracy by up to $+13\%$ along an inverted-U sweet spot; the effect's sign flips between the over- and under-fitting regimes; noise injection matches an explicit spectral-filtering frontier. Our results organize two reported anecdotes into a single measurable principle for designing quantum-vision models.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Revisiting Active Speaker Detection: An In-the-Wild Benchmark for Generalization and Robustness

We present UniTalk, a novel dataset emphasizing challenging scenarios to enhance model generalization for the task of active speaker detection (ASD). Previously established benchmarks such as AVA predominantly comprise old movies and thus exhibit significant domain gaps with real-world video. In contrast, UniTalk covers diverse video types reflecting challenging real-world conditions, including underrepresented languages, noisy backgrounds, and crowded scenes, while being on par with AVA in scale. Extensive evaluations reveal that ASD remains unsolved under realistic conditions: state-of-the-art models near-perfect on AVA fail to reach saturation on UniTalk. Conversely, models trained on UniTalk generalize better to modern in-the-wild datasets including Talkies and ASW. UniTalk thus establishes a new benchmark for ASD, providing researchers with a valuable resource for developing and evaluating versatile and resilient models.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Motion Reinforces Appearance: RGB-Skeleton Gated Residual Fusion for Micro-Gesture Online Recognition

Micro-gesture analysis attracts increasing attention for inferring spontaneous emotion from subtle body movements. Micro-gesture online recognition, which localizes and classifies each gesture instance in untrimmed videos, is a core task in the 4th EI-MiGA-IJCAI Challenge. Compared with typical temporal action detection, MGR emphasizes the localization and classification of actions, requiring the model to output the start time, end time, and category of each micro-gesture. Moreover, since micro-gestures are highly spontaneous, relying solely on a single modality makes it difficult to capture the complete and accurate multi-modal cues. In this work, we propose DyFADet+, which extends DyFADet into a dual-stream RGB-skeleton framework. In our model, both modalities are projected into shared multi-scale temporal embeddings and fused through a gated residual module, which adaptively injects skeleton motion into the RGB representation rather than using naive concatenation. Finally, these fused features are decoded by a Dynamic TAD head for online classification and boundary regression. On the SMG dataset, our method achieves an F1 score of 40.88, ranking 2nd in the Micro-gesture Online Recognition track.

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

Noise-Driven Exploration and Transient Freezing Select Flat Minima in Stochastic Gradient Descent

arXiv:2601.10962v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to deep learning, yet the dynamical origin of its preference for flatter, more generalizable solutions remains unclear. Here, by analyzing SGD learning dynamics, we identify a nonequilibrium mechanism that governs solution selection during training. Numerical experiments reveal a transient exploratory phase in which SGD trajectories repeatedly escape sharp valleys and migrate toward flatter regions of the loss landscape before becoming confined to a final basin. Using a tractable physical model, we show that SGD noise reshapes the loss landscape into an effective potential that preferentially stabilizes flat solutions. We further uncover a transient freezing mechanism: as training progresses, the flattening landscape suppresses transitions between competing valleys. Stronger SGD noise delays this freezing transition, prolonging the exploratory phase and thereby increasing the probability of convergence to flatter minima. Together, these results provide a unified physical framework connecting learning dynamics, loss-landscape geometry, and generalization, and suggest guiding principles for the design of more effective optimization algorithms.

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

The Machine Learning Approach to Moment Closure Relations for Plasma: A Review

arXiv:2511.22486v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The requirement for large-scale global simulations of plasma is an ongoing challenge in both space and laboratory plasma physics. Any simulation based on a fluid model inherently requires a closure relation for the high order plasma moments. This review compiles and analyses the recent surge of machine learning approaches developing improved plasma closure models capable of capturing kinetic phenomena within plasma fluid models. We survey two methodological families: neural-network surrogates (from multilayer perceptrons to Fourier neural operators, the latter recently reproducing both linear and non-linear Landau damping online within a fluid solver) and equation-discovery methods such as sparse regression; and organise the studies by whether they are tested offline against reference data or online within a time-evolving solver. We outline the challenges associated with machine-learning closures, including off-diagonal pressure-tensor accuracy, generalisation beyond the training distribution, and stable integration into large-scale simulations, and the directions future research might take to address them.

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

Show the Signal, Hide the Noise: Spectral Forcing for Pixel-Space Diffusion

Pixel-space diffusion models are trained on full-bandwidth noisy images, yet the useful signal available to the denoiser is strongly frequency dependent. Under rectified-flow diffusion and natural-image power-law spectra, the per-band data-to-noise contour $k^{*}(t) = (1-t)^{-2/\alpha}$ separates a signal-bearing low-frequency region from a noise-dominated high-frequency region at each time $t$. We show that this implicit coarse-to-fine structure is not merely descriptive: it induces a capacity-allocation problem. A standard pixel-space denoiser must discover the moving bandwidth boundary internally and can spend computation on frequency-time regions where the optimal prediction collapses to deterministic baselines rather than data-distribution modeling. To make this boundary explicit, we introduce Spectral Forcing, a parameter-free, time-conditional 2D-DCT low-pass operator applied to the noisy input before the patch embedder. Its cutoff expands monotonically with the diffusion time and becomes the identity at the data endpoint. Through controlled synthetic experiments, we identify the regime in which the operator is beneficial: coarse patch tokenization and data whose high-frequency content is predominantly noise rather than essential signal. On ImageNet-256 with JiT-700M/32, Spectral Forcing consistently improves both FID and Inception Score across different training epochs, demonstrating robust gains throughout training; at finer tokenization, the spectral forcing is still competitive. We further insert the unchanged operator into SenseNova-U1, a unified text-to-image model, where it improves DPG-Bench and GenEval, showing that the input-side spectral prior transfers beyond class-conditional generation. These results suggest a route to capacity-efficient pixel-space diffusion by showing the signal and hiding the noise.

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

Corpus Augmentation for Sign Language Translation via LLM-Guided Video Stitching

Sign language translation (SLT) converts sign language video into spoken language text and holds significant promise for improving accessibility and enabling communication between signing and non-signing communities. While large weakly-aligned datasets have enabled pre-training at scale and gloss-free methods have reduced reliance on expert annotation, high-quality parallel sign video-text pairs for fine-tuning remain scarce, limiting generalisation on long-tail vocabulary and unseen constructions. We propose a corpus augmentation approach that requires no additional human annotation, external sign-language video corpora, or generative video models, relying only on the existing gloss-annotated training corpus and an LLM for sentence generation: per-gloss clips are extracted from training videos via CTC forced-alignment, novel gloss-sentence pairs are generated by a corpus-anchored LLM, and synthetic sequences are assembled through random sentence sampling and clip assignment. The resulting synthetic RGB video-text pairs are architecture-agnostic at the downstream training stage and can be consumed directly by RGB-based SLT models, or converted into pose or feature representations by pipelines that derive such inputs from video. Sincan et al. re-evaluated five recent gloss-free methods under strictly identical conditions; the largest verified gain over the GFSLT-VLP baseline was only 0.98 BLEU-4. Our augmentation, applied within the same framework, achieves +2.92 BLEU-4 without any change to architecture or training protocol. We further identify that synthetic data harms vision-language pretraining despite improving its objectives, and that optimising clip transitions for visual smoothness is counter-productive under L2-based criteria; we propose that abrupt boundaries may act as a form of implicit regularisation. Code is available at https://github.com/robizso/slt-datagen.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the $d$-rigidity phase transition in random graphs

Authors:

arXiv:2605.25711v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study generic $d$-dimensional rigidity in sparse random graphs. Our main result is that for every $d\ge 2$, the Erdős–Rényi random graph $G\sim G(n,c/n)$ undergoes a $d$-rigidity phase transition at the known, explicit, $d$-orientability threshold $c_d$: If $cc_d$, then $G$ is a.a.s. not independent in the generic $d$-rigidity matroid, and we give a sharp asymptotic estimate for its rank. In addition, the $d$-rigidity closure of $G$ has a giant clique of linear size, which contains all but at most $o(n)$ vertices of the $((d+1)+d)$-core of the graph. More generally, we compute, up to a $1+o(1)$ factor, the generic $d$-rigidity rank of random graphs with a given degree distribution. For example, we show that the uniform $n$-vertex $k$-regular graph a.a.s. has rank $\min(k/2,d)n+o(n).$ Our approach is to estimate the rigidity rank of a random graph from its Galton–Watson local weak limit, using a parameter that we call local flexibility.

10.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

Assessing the importance of sex and disease-specific anatomy in electrophysiology and mechanical simulations with a newly developed public virtual cohort of four-chamber heart models

by José Alonso Solís-Lemus, Rosie K. Barrows, Cristobal Rodero, Marina Strocchi, Natalie Montarello, Nishant Lahoti, Cesare Corrado, Abdul Qayyum, Shahrokh Rahmani, Caroline Roney, Gernot Plank, Christoph Augustin, Hao Xu, Alistair Young, Pras Pathmanathan, Ronak Rajani, Steven A. Niederer This work presents a study on how differences in cardiac anatomy attributed to sex and disease can influence cardiac electrophysiology and mechanics using a virtual cohort of four-chamber heart models. Patient anatomy varies across sex and disease. However, capturing this variation in in-silico studies remains poorly accounted for, with studies often using either single representative cases or imbalanced virtual cohorts. Whole-heart electromechanics models incorporate the patient’s anatomy, electrophysiology and mechanics across different scales, from molecular, tissue and whole-heart and circulatory system levels. However, cardiac models are typically built from one or a small number of anatomies, with sex rarely reported and the effects of anatomical variability, which include those due to sex or disease, largely unexplored. This limits clinical translation and reduces regulatory credibility. We developed fifty patient-specific anatomical models of 25 male and 25 female hearts in heart failure and control cases. We ran benchmark passive inflation and paced activation simulations with consistent parameters and boundary conditions across cases to isolate the impact of anatomical variations with sex and disease. Heart failure models exhibited increased chamber volumes, larger volume changes during inflation, and delayed activation times relative to controls. These trends were consistent across sexes, although right ventricular activation showed a significant sex-based difference. Variations in anatomy with sex and disease have a significant impact on cardiac simulations, which support the inclusion of multiple heart anatomical models in in-silico trials. The resulting virtual cohort captures key anatomical variability and is publicly available, along with the underlying code (see Data Availability statement).

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A tree-free approach to 3D Yang-Mills Langevin dynamic. Analytic estimates and the existence of a model for a regularity structure

arXiv:2605.14616v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using the multi-index approach to regularity structures due to F. Otto et al., we construct a regularity structure and a model for it associated to the stochastic Langevin equation for the 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills functional. For the model we also obtain global stochastic and global pointwise weighted Besov type estimates which hold almost surely. The model is defined as a limit of a sequence of smooth models introduced with the help of a mollified noise. When the mollification is removed the sequence converges in a certain topology defined with the help of the stochastic estimates. To obtain these results we develop the multi-index approach for systems of equations with vector-valued white noises. This project is motivated by the problem for constructing 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills measure and by the earlier results of the author on the related problem of canonical quantization of the Yang-Mills field on the Minkowski space.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hilbert-Geo: Solving Solid Geometric Problems by Neural-Symbolic Reasoning

Geometric problem solving, as a typical multimodal reasoning problem, has attracted much attention and made great progress recently, however most of works focus on plane geometry while usually fail in solid geometry due to 3D spatial diagrams and complex reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce Hilbert-Geo, the first unified formal language framework for solid geometry, including an extensive predicate library and a dedicated theorem bank. Based on this framework, we propose a Parse2Reason method containing two steps of first parsing then reasoning. In the parsing step, we utilize conditional description language (CDL), a formalized language composed of predicates specifically designed to construct geometric conditions, to represent both problem description (natural text) and solid diagrams (visual image). In the reasoning step, we leverage those formal CDL and the theorem bank to perform relational inference and algebraic computation, generating strictly correct, verifiable, and human-readable reasoning processes. Notably, our proposed Hilbert-Geo is also applicable to plane geometry. To advance geometric reasoning, we curate two expert-annotated dataset SolidFGeo2k and PlaneFGeo3k, which are furnished with geometric formal language annotations, solutions and answers. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance 77.3% in SolidFGeo2k and 84.1% in MathVerse-Solid (one small subset in MathVerse dedicated to solid geometry), substantially outperforming leading MLLMs, such as Gemini-2.5-pro (54.2% on SolidFGeo2k) and GPT-5 (62.9% on MathVerse-Solid). In addition, our method achieves the SOTA accuracy 80.2% in PlaneFGeo3k, demonstrating the generality of the Hilbert-Geo in geometric reasoning. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/PremiLab-Math/Hilbert-Geo.

13.
Science (Express) 2026-06-02

Another red alert for American science | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Although research has bipartisan support in the US Congress, and trust in science is above 75% across the country, the Trump administration seems as determined as ever to mortally wound the nation’s scientific enterprise. After the scientific community persuaded Congress to restore most of the president’s draconian cuts to research funding last year, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), under Russell Vought, has found new ways to circumvent the will of Congress and starve American science. At the beginning of this year, OMB dragged its feet in releasing instructions to federal agencies for how to distribute the funding appropriated by Congress, leading to lags in dispersal. Now, OMB has proposed revising the rules that govern how federal dollars are spent. The changes would inevitably lead to unlegislated reductions in funding and damage US leadership in science, both in academia and industry.

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

ArFake: A Robust Framework for Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Spoofing Detection Benchmark

With the rise of generative text-to-speech models, distinguishing between real and synthetic speech has become challenging, especially for Arabic that have received limited research attention. Most spoof detection efforts have focused on English, leaving a significant gap for Arabic and its many dialects. In this work, we introduce the first multi-dialect Arabic spoofed speech dataset. To evaluate the difficulty of the synthesized audio from each model and determine which produces the most challenging samples, we aimed to guide the construction of our final dataset either by merging audios from multiple models or by selecting the best-performing model, we conducted an evaluation pipeline that included training classifiers using two approaches: modern embedding-based methods combined with classifier heads; classical machine learning algorithms applied to MFCC features; and the RawNet2 architecture. The pipeline further incorporated the calculation of Mean Opinion Score based on human ratings, as well as processing both original and synthesized datasets through an Automatic Speech Recognition model to measure the Word Error Rate. Our results demonstrate that FishSpeech outperforms other TTS models in Arabic voice cloning on the Casablanca corpus, producing more realistic and challenging synthetic speech samples. However, relying on a single TTS for dataset creation may limit generalizability.

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

Forecasting Is Not Attribution: Localizing Decoder Bypass in Graph-Based Neural Marketing Mix Models

arXiv:2606.12687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Marketing mix models are used to forecast business outcomes and to attribute those outcomes to marketing channels, but these goals are not equivalent. We study a failure mode in graph-based neural MMM called attribution bypass: a high-capacity decoder can obtain low forecasting error through target autoregression, dense communication, co-movement, context, or latent memory while failing to route counterfactual sensitivity through the graph used as the attribution object. We introduce DICE-MMM as a bounded diagnostic and training framework. We do not claim that observational neural MMM identifies causal effects. Instead, DICE separates three questions often conflated in graph-based MMM: graph recovery, forecasting accuracy, and whether the trained decoder's perturbation-induced influence is graph aligned. Stage 1 trains a graph encoder with a restricted graph-mediated decoder. Stage 2 freezes the selected encoder and trains a graph-safe latent decoder whose cross-node communication must pass through the supplied graph. Decoder use is evaluated with CIG, AR-CIG, and graph-swap tests. Across controlled R/d/T swaps and an external multi-graph rawlog stress test, DICE improves stable graph recovery over CausalMMM. The experiments show that forecasting accuracy is not an attribution certificate: in a sparse-target benchmark, no-graph and full-graph decoders achieve MSE@7 around 0.004 while AR-CIG nAUPRC remains near or below zero, whereas an oracle graph reaches 0.807 +/- 0.129 at comparable MSE. Frozen graph-swap localizes the bottleneck: the same DICE-hard-trained decoder moves from nAUPRC -0.044 +/- 0.006 under learned graph inputs to 0.894 +/- 0.027 with the oracle graph. The contribution is a stress test and failure-localization framework showing that low MSE can hide attribution bypass and that the unresolved bottleneck is graph-support selection, not forecasting or decoder capacity.

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

RaLMPH: Reliability-aware Learning for Multi-Pathologist Harmonization in Whole-Slide Image Classification

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a standard paradigm for Whole-Slide Image (WSI) analysis and has achieved strong results in computational pathology. However, most MIL pipelines assume a single "gold" label per slide, which conflicts with clinical practice where substantial inter-pathologist variability is common. Existing multi-annotator learning and label-refinement methods typically estimate global annotator reliability or rely on single-instance assumptions, making them poorly suited to MIL and to localized diagnostic contexts where experts disagree. We propose RaLMPH (Reliability-aware Learning for Multi-Pathologist Harmonization), a MIL-based label reconciliation framework for WSIs annotated by multiple pathologists. RaLMPH introduces a reliability field that jointly models (i) local neighborhood structure in WSI feature space and (ii) expert uncertainty (entropy), enabling per-sample identification of trustworthy reference neighborhoods. Leveraging this field, RaLMPH performs sample-wise local annotator ranking to select reliable opinions per slide and applies an adaptive gating mechanism to fuse labels conditioned on local reliability. Experiments on a clinical WSI dataset with labels from six pathologists, as well as controlled simulated benchmarks, show that RaLMPH consistently outperforms existing approaches. Further analyses clarify how our reliability-aware mechanism improves label reconciliation and downstream MIL performance.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Disentangling Confounders from Pathology in Long-COVID Trajectory Prediction for Women: An Interpretable Large-Language-Model Approach

Objective. Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC, "Long COVID") dispropor- tionately affects women, in whom hallmark symptoms–insomnia, fatigue, palpitations, cogni- tive difficulty–overlap with comorbidities and hormonal transitions such as menopause. This diagnostic overlap is a confounding problem: models that forecast future symptom severity risk attributing baseline physiological noise to viral pathology. We ask whether an interpretable, causally disentangled language model can separate true pathological signal from such con- founders while remaining competitive with strong predictors of future PASC severity

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

How Events Separated by a Timelike Interval Can Help Us Understand Quantum Nonlocality

arXiv:2604.03744v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum entanglement plays a fundamental role in quantum cryptography and computation. An important example of quantum entanglement can be found in the correlations of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR). However, despite the plethora of articles related to the topic, different interpretations of the EPR correlations coexist, and a consensus has not yet been reached. In this article, we seek to demonstrate, through the simple and direct application of quantum formalism, how events separated by timelike intervals can, strangely enough, help us better understand some aspects of the so-called "quantum nonlocality" associated with EPR correlations.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

DCD: Domain-Oriented Design for Controlled Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2604.07590v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used to ground large language models in external knowledge sources. However, when applied to heterogeneous corpora and multi-step queries, Naive RAG pipelines often degrade in quality due to flat knowledge representations and the absence of explicit workflows. In this work, we introduce DCD (Domain-Collection-Document), a domain-oriented design to structure knowledge and control query processing in RAG systems without modifying the underlying language model. The proposed approach relies on a hierarchical decomposition of the information space and multi-stage routing based on structured model outputs, enabling progressive restriction of both retrieval and generation scopes. The architecture is complemented by smart chunking, hybrid retrieval, and integrated validation and generation guardrail mechanisms. We describe the DCD architecture and workflow and discuss evaluation results on synthetic evaluation dataset, highlighting their impact on robustness, factual accuracy, and answer relevance in applied RAG scenarios.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Holistic Data Scheduler for LLM Pre-training via Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

The composition of training data, governed by the diversity of sources and their mixing strategy, is a cornerstone of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training. Online Data Mixing (ODM), the technique of adaptively adjusting data mixtures during training, has emerged as a promising direction to improve efficiency. However, existing methods are constrained by their reliance on a singular optimization perspective, which fundamentally overlooks the need for complex LLM pre-training to consider the dynamic data composition from multiple dimensions. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the Holistic Data Scheduler (HDS), a novel online data mixing framework. HDS formulates the data scheduling challenge as a reinforcement learning problem in a continuous control space and leverages the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm for its stability and sample efficiency in exploring the high-dimensional policy space. At the core of HDS lies a novel multi-objective, holistic reward function that integrates three critical perspectives: a data-driven reward for quality, a loss-driven reward capturing inter-domain influence, and a model-driven reward based on weight norms. To validate our design and determine its optimal configuration, we conducted systematic experiments on LLMs of various sizes. On The Pile benchmark, HDS reaches the final validation perplexity of the next best method with 44% fewer training iterations. Furthermore, it achieves a 7.2% improvement on the MMLU 0-shot task along with consistent gains on other benchmarks, showcasing its ability to enhance both training efficiency and final model capability.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

OmniMouse: Scaling properties of multi-modal, multi-task Brain Models on 150B Neural Tokens

arXiv:2604.18827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling data and artificial neural networks has transformed AI, driving breakthroughs in language and vision. Whether similar principles apply to modeling brain activity remains unclear. Here we leveraged a dataset of 3.1 million neurons from the visual cortex of 73 mice across 323 sessions, totaling more than 150 billion neural tokens recorded during natural movies, images and parametric stimuli, and behavior. We train multi-modal, multi-task models that support three regimes flexibly at test time: neural prediction, behavioral decoding, neural forecasting, or any combination of the three. OmniMouse achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming specialized baselines across nearly all evaluation regimes. We find that performance scales reliably with more data, but gains from increasing model size saturate. This inverts the standard AI scaling story: in language and computer vision, massive datasets make parameter scaling the primary driver of progress, whereas in brain modeling – even in the mouse visual cortex, a relatively simple system – models remain data-limited despite vast recordings. The observation of systematic scaling raises the possibility of phase transitions in neural modeling, where larger and richer datasets might unlock qualitatively new capabilities, paralleling the emergent properties seen in large language models. Code available at https://github.com/enigma-brain/omnimouse.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

When to Trust, How to Distill: Multi-Foundation Model Guidance for Lightweight, Robust Scientific Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) in physical sciences is hindered by a critical trade-off: while these models encode rich, universal temporal dynamics, they suffer from severe distributional misalignment when applied zero-shot to specific scientific domains, and their computational cost prohibits deployment in edge-computing sensor networks. We address a fundamental challenge: How can we extract latent structural knowledge from misaligned foundation models (FM) to train lightweight, specialized forecasters? We propose Gated Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Distillation (Guard), a novel framework that reframes multiteacher distillation as an instance-wise decision process with two adaptive mechanisms: (1) a Contextual Router that dynamically selects the most relevant teacher based on local input statistics, exploiting complementarity across diverse foundation models; and (2) an Uncertainty-Gated Temperature mechanism that acts as a "circuit-breaker," automatically attenuating distillation strength when teacher confidence diverges from domain reality. We evaluate our proposed lightweight framework on four climate-critical domains: meteorology, ecosystem carbon flux, soil moisture, and energy grids. Our method significantly reduces RMSE relative to a fixed-weight multi-teacher distillation baseline, successfully distilling knowledge from pretrained FMs (teachers) even when they exhibit suboptimal zero-shot accuracy due to distribution shift between the original and target data domains. We demonstrate that these domain-misaligned teachers can still serve as critical correctives, outperforming the globally superior FMs on 28.5% of the hardest instances. Ultimately, this enables high-precision scientific forecasting suitable for resource-constrained edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/RupasreeDey/GUARD-KDD2026.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Attention Alignment Between Humans and Vision-Language Models

Visual perception depends on top-down goals and bottom-up sensory mechanisms. Vision-language models implement both, allowing us to treat each component as a separable hypothesis about what drives where we look. We compared spatial attention maps from six vision-language models against human fixation heatmaps recorded on 200 images during two tasks (general description and social captioning). The six models spanned a 2$\times$2 factorial of CNN vs.\ ViT encoders crossed with LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders, plus Molmo 7B-D and Qwen3.5 9B. We found that both decoder and encoder architecture shaped alignment, but decoder choice dominated. LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders increased alignment by 40–50 percentage points (80–87\% vs.\ 40–59\% of the human noise ceiling). In contrast, CNN vs.\ ViT encoders contributed a secondary 5–20 point advantage depending on decoder family, with CNN-LSTM the most aligned model overall (85–87\%). Despite their alignment advantage, LSTM-decoder attention maps were spatially diffuse and minimally task-differentiated; ViT-Transformer, the weakest in alignment, showed the sharpest spatial concentration and strongest task differentiation. A hemispatial-neglect simulation confirmed that ablating attention impacted LSTM decoders more than Transformer decoders. In an exploratory extension using TRIBE-simulated synthetic neural responses, fixation alignment and neural relevance dissociate: CNN-Transformer attention maps better predicted synthetic brain activity despite lower fixation alignment, with attention maps best predicting early visual cortex. Together, top-down and bottom-up components trade off what they predict in behavioral and synthetic neural data.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CUPID: Reconstructing UV Texture Maps for Interpretable Person-of-Interest Deepfake Detection

Deepfakes targeting a high-profile individual, known as Person-of-Interest (POI), are a threat to modern democracies and societies. Current POI deepfake detection methods still struggle to combine robustness to post-processing, efficiency and interpretability, focal aspects of modern deepfake detectors. In this paper we propose CUPID, a POI video deepfake detector that combines UV texture maps, a facial appearance representation derived from 3D face reconstructions, with the representation learning capabilities of the Masked Autoencoder (MAE). Our method does not require any deepfake videos in its training phase. Moreover, it does not even require to include a specific POI in the training set: the combination of UV texture maps extracted from real video frames and the MAE context-guided reconstruction yields a latent space that captures rich and discriminative facial features also for identities unseen during training. In the testing phase, the embeddings extracted from a query video depicting the POI can be matched against pristine reference videos to assess the video authenticity. Furthermore, operating in the UV space naturally provides an additional layer of interpretability. Specifically, we can extract decoded residual maps that highlight which facial regions of a test video deviate most from the identity representation of the corresponding POI. Experiments on four deepfake datasets show that CUPID outperforms current state of the art on most datasets and achieves the best overall robustness against strong downscaling and compression, providing also substantially faster inference. Our experimental code will be released at https://github.com/polimi-ispl/CUPID.

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

Neural-Parameterized Cellular Automata for Wildfire Spread

arXiv:2606.11676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional wildfire models rely on rigid, low-dimensional parameters and static fuel maps, frequently underpredicting fire spread. To address this weakness, we introduce a hybrid deep-learning parameterized Probabilistic Cellular Automata (CA) framework implemented in JAX. Our approach employs a Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network to dynamically generate spatially varying parameters that govern fire-spread probability, wind alignment, and slope influence. This hybrid design captures complex, nonlinear environmental interactions while preserving the physical interpretability of the underlying three-state CA. The JAX implementation enables hardware acceleration and gradient-based parameter calibration. Evaluated on six large-scale wildfires in the western United States, the model maintains IoU > 0.6 over 72-hour forecast horizons after a 10-day data assimilation window during which the model is fitted incrementally to observed perimeters; the resulting forecast is a conditional projection of fire growth under the suppression regime already ncoded in those observations.