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.CL) 2026-06-19

CATCH-ME if you RAG: a dataset of Contextually Annotated multi-Turn Counterspeech against Hate and Misinformation Exchanges

Online hate speech and misinformation frequently overlap, yet NLP research has mainly treated them in isolation. While LLMs represent a scalable solution for assisting humans in the generation of counterspeech for both threats, zero-shot models frequently generate repetitive and vague responses, underscoring the need for high-quality examples to steer model generation. However, existing counterspeech datasets against the overlap of hate and misinformation are scarce and limited to single-turn English dialogues, while real-life interactions span across multiple turns and languages. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first large-scale, expert-curated, multilingual dataset of dialogues tackling the intersection of hate and misinformation. To ensure factual grounding, the dialogues are also anchored in verified external knowledge (i.e., fact-checking articles and NGO reports) and include document- and chunk-level span annotations, making it directly applicable for RAG systems. Covering five languages and targeting hate directed at seven marginalized groups, this novel resource enables the training and evaluation of more persuasive, factually grounded counterspeech models.

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

HGCN(O): A Self-Tuning GCN HyperModel Toolkit for Outcome Prediction in Event-Sequence Data

arXiv:2507.22524v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose HGCN(O), a self-tuning toolkit using Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) models for event sequence prediction. Featuring four GCN architectures (O-GCN, T-GCN, TP-GCN, TE-GCN) across the GCNConv and GraphConv layers, our toolkit integrates multiple graph representations of event sequences with different choices of node- and graph-level attributes and in temporal dependencies via edge weights, optimising prediction accuracy and stability for balanced and unbalanced datasets. Extensive experiments show that GCNConv models excel on unbalanced data, while all models perform consistently on balanced data. Experiments also confirm the superior performance of HGCN(O) over traditional approaches. Applications include Predictive Business Process Monitoring (PBPM), which predicts future events or states of a business process based on event logs.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Under What Conditions Can a Machine Become Genuinely Creative?

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent AI systems can generate texts, software architectures, hypotheses, designs, and scientific workflows that appear creative. This paper asks under what conditions a machine can become genuinely creative, and how human agency can be preserved within shared cognitive and creative environments. It develops a requirement framework derived from Designics, the science of meaning-bearing intentional change. The paper argues that genuine machine creativity should not be defined by output novelty, current performance, or transient architecture alone. Instead, creativity is understood as the structural transformation of incomplete situations through recursive intervention dynamics. On this view, it depends on ten requirements: environment representation, scoped perception, conflict identification, intervention capability, consequence observation, knowledge and environment update, rescoping, local-to-global unfolding, value-based scoping, and human-AI co-living. These are organized through the three laws of Designics: perception, conflict, and capability. The paper illustrates the computational tractability of these requirements through selected cyber-physical and cyber-biological studies, including recursive element extraction, autonomous mesh generation, and neurophysiological and workload analysis. It then treats open-ended systems, automated discovery frameworks, self-modifying agents, foundation models, and agentic workflows as pressure cases: they demonstrate powerful generative means but do not by themselves establish genuine machine creativity. Finally, the paper argues that proactive AI ethics is internal to genuine machine creativity rather than an after-the-fact filter. Value-based scoping and human-AI co-living must shape how creative machines perceive environments, identify conflicts, select interventions, observe consequences, update knowledge, and rescope future action.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MagicSim: A Unified Infrastructure for Executable Embodied Interaction

Robot learning and embodied agents now require simulation to serve as a shared execution substrate linking control, skills, and planning, not only as a renderer, controller testbed, or fixed task environment. Existing pipelines split these layers with "magic" actions, disconnected training environments, or forward-only renders that cannot reproduce, evaluate, and annotate the same episode. We present MagicSim, an embodied interaction infrastructure built around one deterministic batched runtime and a shared Markov decision process (MDP). From YAML-first specifications that decouple contents, placement, behavior, and agent exposure, MagicSim constructs diverse executable worlds spanning task families, interaction regimes, physics, layouts, sensors, avatars, and robot embodiments in one reset-and-step loop. A common execution interface grounds high-level commands through controllers, atomicskills, planner primitives, and asynchronous planning, realizing them as robot actions rather than simulator-side state edits. One task definition supports three capabilities: benchmark and RL evaluation, an autocollect interface that automatically turns commands into grounded trajectories, and agent/VLM-facing interaction. For automatic execution, commands flow through a Command->Skill->Planner->Robot->Record pipeline, while per-environment command, skill, planning, retry, annotation, and episode states advance independently above the shared physics tick. Successful rollouts are saved as structured multimodal trajectories aligning language supervision, action representations, visual/geometric representations, and task-level status with the executed episode. MagicSim thus unifies diverse world construction, embodied execution, task evaluation, automatic rollout generation, and interactive agent interfaces in one planner-in-the-loop runtime.

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

Efficient Neural Network Model Selection for Few-Class Application Datasets

arXiv:2606.19712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While much effort has focused on developing and benchmarking high-performance neural networks, less attention has been given to how dataset properties, known to practitioners, can guide efficient model selection. Neural models are typically evaluated on datasets with thousands of classes, yet many real-world applications involve fewer than ten. To address this understudied but common setting, we develop a measure of classification difficulty based on data-side properties and show how it enables more efficient model selection for few-class datasets, where traditional approaches are less effective. We term this phenomenon "few-class distinctiveness". Our metric allows comparison of models and datasets 6 to 29$\times$ faster than repeated training and testing. Leveraging this insight, we extend scaled model families below the smallest published models, achieving greater efficiency at similar accuracy, for example models up to 42% smaller than YOLOv5-nano for a mobile robot task. Targeting resource-constrained applications, we demonstrate few-class model selection across mobile robot, drone, and IoT scenarios, highlighting practical gains in efficiency without sacrificing performance.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

StPedf: Cell trajectory inference of spatial transcriptomics via spatial proximity embedding and spatial density-adaptive fusion

Authors:

by Yuan Zhang, Ziyan Sun, Zhixin Shi, Mengdi Nan, Yuhan Fu, Qing Ren, Jie Gao Spatial transcriptomics is transforming our multidimensional understanding of cellular spatial organization and its functional mechanisms in processes such as development and disease by systematically resolving the spatial heterogeneity of gene expression within tissues. To delve deeper into the dynamic processes underlying spatial expression patterns, spatial trajectory inference integrates genetic and spatial information to reconstruct the spatial developmental trajectories of cells within tissues. This approach reveals the patterns of differentiation and dynamic changes as cellular states evolve continuously along spatial axes. However, existing methods often struggle to uniformly model the complex, nonlinear interactions between high-dimensional gene expression and spatial coordinates. Here, we introduce StPedf, whose core lies in employing a neural network with a masking mechanism to capture complex nonlinear interactions between high-dimensional genes and spatial positions. It further leverages spatial proximity information as a guiding cue, dynamically and adaptively adjusting the embedding of gene and spatial information and the weighting of spatial proximity information based on spatial density. This enables trajectory inference guided by spatial information. This enables optimal transport to derive intercellular transition matrices, reconstruct cellular differentiation trajectories, and construct pseudo-spatiotemporal maps. StPedf demonstrates superior performance over existing methods on five structurally distinct simulated datasets. Using StPedf, we successfully mapped distinct lineages in the spatial trajectories of telencephalon regeneration in the Ambystoma mexicanum, multiple malignant lineages expanding within primary tumors, and developmental spatial trajectories and pseudo-spatiotemporal maps in human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). StPedf significantly enhances the accuracy and interpretability of spatial trajectory inference, providing critical technical support for revealing the dynamic patterns of cellular fate transitions within tissue microenvironments.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

What Do Safety-Aligned LLMs Learn From Mixed Compliance Demonstrations?

arXiv:2606.20508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has shown that in-context demonstrations can jailbreak language models, but it remains unclear how models interpret different types of compliance demonstrations. We study this by mixing benign compliance demonstrations (non-harmful request, helpful response) with harmful compliance demonstrations (harmful request, helpful response) and testing three hypotheses about how demonstration composition drives harmful compliance. Across four models, we find that benign and harmful demonstrations are not interchangeable: benign demonstrations can either reduce or increase harmful compliance depending on the model. We further show that preference optimization is the critical training stage that prevents benign demonstrations from increasing harmful compliance, that demonstration ordering exhibits strong recency bias, and that models differ in how refusal interacts with in-context learning: some adopt demonstrated formatting even when refusing, while others override all in-context signals upon refusal. Taken together, this work moves beyond showing that demonstration-based jailbreaking works to characterizing how it works: what models extract from compliance demonstrations depends on demonstration content, ordering, and training methodology.

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

PHINN: Persistent Homology Inspired Neural Network for Rare-Event Time Series Generation

arXiv:2606.15452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rare events in time series are critical to model but hard to learn due to data scarcity. Current generative models struggle with extreme values. We observe that rare events leave distinct topological fingerprints - transitions in Betti numbers from point-cloud embeddings - that are more stable and discriminative than statistical moments. We introduce PHINN, a flow-matching framework using dynamic Betti curves as conditioning signals and a persistence landscape loss for homology consistency. It scales to multivariate data, includes a natural-language interface to set Betti targets, supports cross-domain meta-learning and few-shot generation, and provides certified adversarial robustness. On financial, epidemiological, and multi-modal benchmarks, PHINN outperforms statistical and diffusion baselines in topological fidelity (beta-RMSE down 41-63%, transition accuracy up 84%) and matches jump-diffusion models in tail coverage while exceeding them in shape fidelity. All results have 95% confidence intervals.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SAFE-Cascade: Cost-Adaptive Vision-Language Routing for Chart Question Answering

Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful for chart question answering, but invoking a VLM for every query can be unnecessarily expensive when many questions are answerable from OCR text and lightweight language reasoning. We demonstrate SAFE-Cascade, an interactive system for cost-adaptive chart question answering. Given a chart image and a natural-language question, SAFE-Cascade first extracts chart text with OCR, obtains a provisional answer from a text-only language model, and then uses a learned router to decide whether to accept the text answer or escalate to a VLM. The demo exposes this decision process to users: OCR evidence, text-only answer, routing probability, escalation decision, final answer, estimated cost, and estimated latency are shown side by side. SAFE-Cascade is designed as a transparent interface for understanding when visual grounding is actually needed. Users can upload or select charts, ask questions, inspect the evidence used by each pathway, compare text-only and VLM answers, and adjust the escalation threshold to explore the accuracy-cost frontier. The system is implemented with Azure Document Intelligence for OCR, gpt-5-mini as the text-only model, gemini-2.5-flash-image as the VLM, and a Random Forest router trained on inference-time features. On a held-out ChartQA test split of 375 examples from a 2,500-example experiment, SAFE-Cascade achieves 69.1% unified accuracy with 73.1% VLM invocation, compared with 67.7% accuracy and 100% VLM invocation for the full-VLM baseline. The observed +1.4 percentage-point difference is statistically uncertain, so we interpret SAFE-Cascade as matching full-VLM performance while reducing VLM calls by 26.9% and estimated cost by 9.3%. The demonstration shows how selective modality routing can make multimodal knowledge systems more transparent, tunable, and cost-aware.

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

Masked Neural Detection for Constrained Channel Coding in Molecular Communication

arXiv:2606.12489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular communication (MC) suffers from severe diffusion memory because molecules released for one symbol may arrive during later symbols. Neural sequence detectors, especially sliding bidirectional recurrent neural networks (SBRNNs), can substantially outperform threshold detectors in such channels. This raises a central question for MC channel coding: does a code whose advantage was established under threshold detection retain it when both coded and uncoded transmission are evaluated with neural detection? This letter answers this question for run-length-limited ISI-mitigation (RLIM) codes, a class of constrained codes previously shown to provide large BER gains in MC. Across the tested operating points, the best RLIM-SBRNN receiver beats the best uncoded receiver, chosen between threshold and SBRNN detection, in $46$ of $59$ cases, with a mean gain of $10.36\times$ over those wins. We also propose an RLIM-tailored training mask for compact SBRNN detectors, improving the unmasked RLIM-SBRNN in $227$ of $236$ comparisons with $3.267\times$ mean gain when masking is beneficial. Finally, the compact masked RLIM-SBRNN is competitive with channel-state-aware MLSE despite using no channel knowledge.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Learning Method with Gap-Aware Generation for Heterogeneous DAG Scheduling

arXiv:2603.23249v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient scheduling of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is a core problem in large-scale data-intensive computing systems, where query plans, data-processing workloads, and computation graphs consist of dependent tasks competing for limited heterogeneous resource pools. In practice, achieving high-performance execution requires schedulers to adapt across environments with varying resource pools and task types, while generating schedules under tight runtime budgets. We propose WeCAN, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework for heterogeneous DAG scheduling that addresses task-pool compatibility coefficients and generation-induced optimality gaps. It adopts a two-stage single-pass design: a single forward pass produces task-pool scores and global parameters, followed by a generation map that constructs schedules without repeated network calls. Its weighted cross-attention encoder models task-pool interactions gated by compatibility coefficients, and is size-agnostic to environment fluctuations. Moreover, widely used list-scheduling maps can incur generation-induced optimality gaps from restricted reachability. We introduce an order-space analysis that characterizes the reachable set of generation maps via feasible schedule orders, explains the mechanism behind generation-induced gaps, and yields sufficient conditions for gap elimination. Guided by these conditions, we design a skip-extended realization with an analytically parameterized decreasing skip rule, which enlarges the reachable order set while preserving single-pass efficiency. Experiments on real-world TPC-H query DAGs, resource-intensive workload datasets, and ML-compiler computation graphs demonstrate improved makespan over strong baselines, with inference time comparable to classical heuristics and faster than multi-round neural schedulers.

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

Quantile-Free Uncertainty Quantification in Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.04847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in graph neural networks (GNNs) is crucial in high-stakes domains but remains a significant challenge. In graph settings, message passing often relies on strong assumptions such as exchangeability, which are rarely satisfied in practice, and achieving reliable UQ typically requires costly resampling or post-hoc calibration. To address these issues, we introduce Quantile-free Prediction Interval GNN (QpiGNN), a framework that builds on quantile regression (QR) to enable GNN-based UQ by directly optimizing coverage and interval width without requiring quantile inputs or post-processing. QpiGNN employs a dual-head architecture that decouples prediction and uncertainty, and is trained with label-only supervision through a quantile-free joint loss. This design allows efficient training and yields robust prediction intervals, with theoretical guarantees of asymptotic coverage and near-optimal width under mild assumptions. Experiments on 19 synthetic and real-world benchmarks show QpiGNN achieves average 22% higher coverage and 50% narrower intervals than baselines, while ensuring efficiency and robustness to noise and structural shifts.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Giving AI a Headache: Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Computer Vision Applications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to automate a variety of real-world computer vision (CV) applications, such as autonomous vehicle control, facial recognition, and security cameras. Recent research has shown that acoustic vibration can induce real physical motion in cameras, interfering with their internal stabilization mechanisms. Because the motion falls outside the conditions the stabilization system was designed to handle, the system introduces artifacts into the frame, causing AI-based CV models to misclassify, miss targets, or hallucinate objects. Previous work used ultrasonic frequencies (>20 kHz) to perform short-range attacks, which limits them to short distances due to the attenuation exhibited by high frequencies. In this work, we investigate acoustic attacks using lower frequencies in the audible range (

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Looked but didn't see: inattentional blindness and yes-bias confabulation in vision-language models

Previous work showed that many participants fail to notice a gorilla in a video of people playing basketball. Another study found that 83% of trained radiologists failed to report a gorilla figure inserted into a chest CT nodule-search task, even though eye-tracking revealed that most observers had foveated the figure. We ask whether a similar phenomenon exists in contemporary vision-language models (VLMs). We find that (i) VLMs are capable of spotting the gorilla in both still-frame images and videos of lung CT scans; (ii) models display inattentional blindness, which varies according to model generation and type of stimulus presented; (iii) Gemini-3.1-Pro outperforms most other flagship and open-weight VLMs at identifying the presence or absence of the gorilla. We additionally ran a segmentation experiment utilizing two different model classes: a generalist (SAM 3), which found the gorilla but produced little to no results for anatomy-based prompts; a medical specialist (BiomedParse), which produced more promising anatomy-based results but flagged "gorilla" on gorilla-free control videos on 82% of frames. The behavioral signature of inattentional blindness reproduces in VLMs, but a unique confabulation failure mode means that any "did the model see X" claim requires signal-detection analysis with a matched-control false-alarm baseline.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Taylor-Calibrate: Principled Initialization for Hybrid Linear Attention Distillation

Hybrid linear attention models offer an appealing path to faster long-context inference: they reduce the quadratic cost and KV-cache burden of full softmax attention while retaining much of the quality of Transformer models. A practical way to obtain such models is to convert a pretrained Transformer instead of pretraining a new architecture from scratch, but this conversion is still brittle. Simply copying the teacher attention projections into a Gated DeltaNet (GDN) student does not specify the new recurrent decay, write, and output-gating dynamics. As a result, the converted model often starts in a poor dynamical regime and must spend many distillation tokens repairing initialization rather than learning the remaining teacher behavior. We propose Taylor-Calibrate, a lightweight initialization method for hybrid GDN students. The method uses Taylor-guided teacher attention statistics to set the value projection, memory timescale, write gates, and output gate, then applies a short per-layer alignment step to match each converted layer to the teacher output. Across four teacher settings and three retained-layer policies, Taylor-Calibrate gives substantially stronger zero-shot students, with up to an 88x improvement in a representative ablation, and reaches matched recovery targets with 4.9x–9.2x fewer training tokens than naive conversion.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

From Uniform to Learned Graph Priors: Diffusion for Structure Discovery

arXiv:2606.11831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural relational inference (NRI) methods discover interaction graphs from trajectories through variational reasoning on discrete potential edges. However, these methods typically rely on oversimplified, factorized graph priors. Such priors, typically nearing uniform distributions, treat edges as independent entities. This systemic misalignment does not match the real-world systems and yields diffuse and indecisive edge posteriors limiting the reliability of structural discovery. To address this, we propose Diff-prior, a diffusion-parameterized adaptive prior used to calibrate latent graph distribution rather than generate graphs. Our core insight is to reframe prior integration as a learnable denoising-style calibration that organizes scattered, uncertain edge posteriors into a more reliable overall structure which can be trained by the diffusion model. Diff-prior learns an adaptive structure prior that performs structured calibration on the edge posteriors during inference, guiding it towards a distribution closer to the underlying structure. The diff-prior operates before structural sampling and acts as a denoising calibrator directly on the encoder edge distribution, which provides a generic training paradigm over structured variables. Experiments on standard benchmarks validated our framework, and the results indicate that Diff-prior improves the performance of structure inference and generates more decisive edge posteriors across multiple NRI-family architectures. The code is available on https://github.com/Hardy158118/Diffprior.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A green solvent screening tool for emerging materials via uncertainty aware, transformer enhanced transfer learning

arXiv:2606.13060v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of solubility remains a central challenge across materials science and sustainable chemistry. In particular due to emerging technologies like organic and hybrid photovoltaics, batteries, and catalysis, solvent usage is expected to increase significantly within the coming years. Therefore, substituting solvents with greener alternatives is vital. This is where machine learning can have substantial impact. However, the limited data on critical parameters of solubility significantly constraints machine learning efficacy. In this work, we transfer a pre-trained foundational model on QM9 targets to our application with minimal data requirements. Additionally, the pipeline integrates uncertainty quantification, allowing the user to gauge the confidence of the predictions. As baseline, we succeed in predicting the Hansen solubility parameters and Dielectric Constant for which extensive databases exist. Importantly, we achieve high model performance on additional targets, such as Gutmann Donor and Acceptor numbers, where the available data is extremely limited. Overall, we augment data on solubility descriptors by orders of magnitude with high quality predictions. For effective dissemination, we deploy easy-to-use, easily integrateable with high throughput labs, customizable tool for ranking and screening possible solvent substitutes. Finally, we rediscovered known green solvent alternatives and proposed new candidates proving its relevance for finding eco-friendly solvents.

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

SACE: Concept Erasure at the Semantic Singularity in Visual Autoregressive Models

The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has unlocked a transformative frontier for high-fidelity text-to-image synthesis, while heightening concerns over the safety alignment of generated content. Naive application of existing erasure techniques to VAR models causes catastrophic semantic collapse and visual artifacts, since they are predominantly designed for the homogeneous denoising steps of diffusion models. To address this foundational challenge, we first propose the Semantic Singularity Axiom, which posits that any target semantic concept embedded within a prompt is definitively locked at Scale-0. Then rigorously validate this axiom through our proposed Incremental Semantic Saliency Analysis (ISSA),which also enable the community to transparently inspect the coarse-to-fine semantic injection process. Guided by this insight, we introduce the first scale-aware concept erasure framework (SACE) for VAR models. By strictly confining interventions to the first scale, our approach couples an Entropy-Regularized Erasure Objective to prevent high-entropy sampling degeneration, alongside a restorative preservation loss to safely anchor the integrity of entangled benign priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves surgical concept erasure performance across various domains with minimal training overhead, timely and elegently resolute the critical safety vulnerabilities inherent in emerging VAR architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE}{https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Optional Stopping for Superhedging Supermartingales

arXiv:2606.17452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superhedging supermartingales, introduced by the authors in previous work, are non-probabilistic processes defined via subadditive outer integrals that carry a purely financial interpretation in terms of superhedging cost. Building on the Leinert-König theory of non-lattice integration, the present paper establishes several results that are classical in probability theory but whose non-probabilistic proofs require fundamentally new arguments: (i) a tower inequality for the conditional outer integral \overline{\sigma}_j applied at stopping times, reducing to equality when the integrand is conditionally integrable; (ii) three versions of Doob's optional stopping theorem, organised by the class of supermartingale and the range of the stopping times; and (iii) Dubins' upcrossing inequality in both finite- and infinite-time horizons. A key structural result, property (K)-a.e., identifies conditions under which the two superhedging operators \overline{\sigma}_j and \overline{I}_j coincide on non-negative functions, extending the scope of all preceding results to the positive operator \overline{I}_j. None of the proofs invoke classical measure-theoretic tools; in particular, (classical) integrability and measurability are not assumed. The analogues of classical stochastic results acquire a purely financial interpretation and, in this way, gain depth and generality by providing a context that is independent of any a priori probabilistic structure.

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

SCR-Guided Difficulty-Aware Optimization for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection remains challenging due to severe background clutter, low contrast, and weak spatial responses where geometric overlap alone is insufficient to characterize detection quality. In this work, we propose REEM (Reweighted Explicit-visibility Enhanced Modulation), a lightweight SCR-guided difficulty-aware optimization framework that incorporates Signal-to-Clutter Ratio (SCR) as a physically meaningful visibility prior during training. Instead of modifying the network architecture or directly optimizing SCR, REEM computes a ground-truth local SCR from the input image and applies a differentiable modulation to the soft-IoU learning signal, emphasizing low-visibility targets while preserving stable optimization and identical inference behavior. REEM is integrated into a U-Net-based MSHNet without introducing additional parameters, architectural modifications, or inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over the baseline, achieving higher IoU and detection probability (Pd) together with substantially reduced false alarms (FA), particularly under challenging low-visibility conditions. These results suggest that SCR-guided difficulty-aware optimization provides an effective and physically grounded complement to conventional overlap-based objectives for infrared small target detection. The code is available at https://github. com/yall-in-one/Reemm.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

‘Footballers are not superheroes’: we must tackle the mental and physical pressures of elite sport

Authors:

As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge. As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Generative-Model Predictive Planning for Navigation in Partially Observable Environments

arXiv:2606.18888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Navigation in partially observable environments presents a significant challenge for autonomous agents, requiring effective decision-making with limited sensory information in unknown environments. Belief-based methods, particularly those using neural networks to approximate the belief space, often fail to capture the inherent multimodality of belief spaces, especially in high-dimensional cases with perceptual aliasing. While generative models present a compelling alternative, they typically require substantial data or expert demonstrations and lack explicit mechanisms for long-term planning. In this paper, we introduce BeliefDiffusion, a novel framework that combines the benefits of both generation and planning. BeliefDiffusion leverages diffusion models to explicitly characterize multimodal belief distributions and utilizes Model Predictive Control (MPC) to simultaneously plan ahead. It consists of two steps: (1) Imagining plausible environment configurations based on observation history and (2) Planning efficient navigation strategies across an aggregated configurations. Through extensive experiments in synthetic map environments, we demonstrate that BeliefDiffusion significantly outperforms both model-free reinforcement learning baselines and other generative approaches in navigation success rate and path efficiency. Our results validate that explicitly incorporating multimodal belief representations into planning enables more robust navigation in partially observable settings.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

‘Student Geng’ ignites research-integrity scandal in China after calling out senior academics<b> </b>

Authors:

Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations. Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations.

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

Do You Really Need a GPU to Guard Your LLM? CPU-Class Classifiers and Multi-Stage Pipelines for Safety Enforcement at Scale

Safety classifiers that screen LLM inputs for jailbreak attempts have become standard deployment components, yet almost all production systems rely on GPU-based models: fine-tuned transformers and LLM-as-a-judge pipelines. These approaches impose significant per-query latency and infrastructure cost. Very little research has asked whether CPU-based classifiers, such as support vector machines and gradient-boosted trees trained on TF-IDF features, can match their accuracy across the conditions that production deployments encounter. We evaluate five CPU classifier families, Mamba-130M as an SSM-based GPU classifier, and transformer-based GPU models (DeBERTa-v3 and Gemma-2B with LoRA) across nine jailbreak sources and three regimes: in-distribution (D1), out-of-distribution (D2), and adversarially obfuscated (D3). On D1, the best CPU classifier matches the best transformer GPU model at roughly one-fifth the deployment cost. On D2, CPU classifiers fail via confident miscalibration, producing high-confidence false negatives that bypass escalation entirely. On D3, CPU classifiers outperform transformer GPU models by more than 26 percentage points in F1. Based on these complementary failure modes, we design GuardChain, a three-stage safety pipeline (Regex -> CPU -> GPU) that routes each prompt to the cheapest stage capable of a confident decision. The CPU stage alone resolves 80\% of in-distribution prompts at near-peak accuracy, and the GPU stage recovers the out-of-distribution failures. For practitioners deploying LLM safety at scale, this work provides evidence that GPU-class infrastructure is unnecessary for the majority of traffic.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

GePBench: Evaluating Fundamental Geometric Perception for Multimodal Large Language Models

Geometric shapes play important roles in both physical world and human cognition. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in visual understanding, their abilities to recognize geometric shapes and their spatial relationships, which we term geometric perception, are not explicitly and systematically explored. To address this gap, we introduce GePBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess the geometric perception capabilities of MLLMs. Our extensive evaluations reveal that even the current state-of-the-art MLLMs exhibit significant deficiencies in geometric perception tasks. Furthermore, we show that models trained with GePBench data demonstrate considerable improvements on a wide range of downstream tasks, highlighting the critical role of geometric perception in enabling advanced multimodal applications. Our code and datasets are available at \href{https://github.com/Changhao-Xiang/GePBench}{https://github.com/Changhao-Xiang/GePBench}.