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.AI) 2026-06-16

Continuous Cross-Domain Traffic State Prediction via Memory-Augmented Graph Liquid Time-Constant Networks

arXiv:2606.15807v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic state prediction is a fundamental task in intelligent transportation systems. In practical applications, some regions suffer from limited traffic observations due to insufficient sensing infrastructure, making cross-domain knowledge transfer an important solution for data-scarce traffic prediction. However, existing cross-domain traffic prediction methods still face several limitations, including coarse-grained source-target adaptation, limited capability in handling unseen target-domain patterns, and insufficient modeling of continuous traffic dynamics under irregular or heterogeneous temporal conditions. To address these issues, this paper proposes a continuous cross-domain traffic prediction framework, termed Memory-Augmented Graph Liquid Time-Constant Network (MA-GLTC). Specifically, we first construct spatio-temporal units (STUs) to decompose traffic networks into transferable local units, enabling fine-grained knowledge alignment across domains. Then, a graph liquid time-constant network (GLTC) is developed to model graph-coupled traffic evolution in continuous time. Different from generic graph neural ODE-based models, GLTC introduces graph-coupled recurrent conductance into liquid time-constant dynamics, allowing node states to evolve with leakage, adaptive time constants, and neighborhood-aware feedback. Furthermore, a Memory-based Transfer Storage (MTS) mechanism is designed to preserve source-domain knowledge, retrieve matched traffic patterns, and update reliable target-domain patterns when unseen states emerge. Experiments on five public traffic datasets demonstrate that MA-GLTC consistently outperforms representative innerdomain and cross-domain baselines in both short-term and longterm prediction tasks. Compared with the second-best method, MA-GLTC reduces the average prediction errors by 3.02%, 0.33%, 8.92%, 10.09%, and 2.11%, respectively.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

How to Detect and Measure the AI Dangers to Democracy

arXiv:2606.16054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research on artificial intelligence and democracy has grown quickly over the last decade. A shared conclusion in this literature is that AI does not create new democratic problems so much as it makes old ones worse. We now see this across information ecosystems, in elections, and in public administration. However, despite growing evidence, we lack a clear way to prioritize risks in this area, compare them across domains, and identify where democratic control is most likely to break down. So, our problem is: How can we systematize the problems that AI systems pose to democratic processes? This paper argues that principal agent theory may fit the task. In many phases of democratic systems, principals delegate key functions to AI systems and their providers without really being able to monitor how these systems operate or the outputs they produce. Treating AI as a delegation problem helps identify accountability gaps and other governance failures. Most importantly, as we shall illustrate, it provides metrics for empirical assessments of AI impact on democracy. As a second analytical element, we draw on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and its seven characteristics of trustworthy AI, which supply substantive criteria for evaluating delegated tasks. Operationalized across the three domains through measurable indicators and domain specific trustworthiness criteria, we propose an analytical framework that centers on institutional assessability as the central condition for democratic control over AI. However, we stress that how severe a harm is, and how much risk is acceptable, are evaluative judgments that current methodologies neither acknowledge nor operationalize. This becomes acute when such evaluative judgments are (silently) delegated to private vendors. We identify this as a strong limitation left for future work.

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

DenseControl: Instance-Level Controllable Synthesis of Dense Crowd Image

In this paper, we introduce DenseControl, a novel pipeline for generating dense crowd images. Specifically, DenseControl meticulously positions and sizes each generated instance to align precisely with the predefined coordinates and scales. Based on this, we further allow for control over the background, style, and attributes of instances. The motivation behind DenseControl stems from the observation of two main challenges in synthesizing crowd images: controlling signal embedding and maintaining topological integrity when imparting instance scale guidance. To address these, we first introduce the Isolated Object Embedding (IOE) map, a novel representation that facilitates spatial location control while mitigating the difficulties associated with learning projections for model. Secondly, we propose an Implicit Scale Embedding (ISE) strategy that seamlessly integrates with the IOE map to encode precise scale information. To further enhance the efficacy of combining ISE with the IOE map, we incorporate a Position Shortcut mechanism that enhances cross-attention to alleviate projection challenges. We evaluate DenseControl through two lenses: synthesis quality and applicability in latent applications. Experiments across different control conditions demonstrate DenseControl achieves state-of-the-art results in dense crowd image synthesis. Furthermore, we showcase applications in augmenting crowd analysis under data scarcity, transfer learning, and weather generalization scenes, to highlight the practical utility of DenseControl. The codebase will be released.

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

Latent World Recovery for Multimodal Learning with Missing Modalities

arXiv:2606.12362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study multimodal learning under missing modalities, with particular motivation from bioscience applications in which heterogeneous modalities are often only partially available when decisions need to be made. We propose Latent World Recovery (LWR), a framework built on two key ideas: (i) modality-specific embeddings from different modalities are aligned in a shared latent space, and (ii) a unified representation is constructed by fusing only the embeddings of the modalities that are actually available at both training and inference time. Rather than imputing missing modalities or requiring a fixed modality set, LWR treats each modality as a partial perception of an underlying latent state and performs availability-aware representation learning directly from the observed modalities. This combination of neighbor-based latent alignment and availability-aware modality fusion enables robust multimodal prediction under partial observation, while avoiding error propagation from explicit reconstruction of missing modalities. We evaluate the proposed framework on real-world incomplete multi-omics benchmarks and demonstrate that it provides an effective approach to downstream tasks such as cancer phenotype classification and survival prediction.

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

Learn to Quantify Social Interaction with Constraints for Pedestrian Walking

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term human path forecasting in crowds is critical for autonomous moving platforms (like autonomous driving cars and social robots) to avoid collision and make high-quality planning. Although the current research take into account social interactions for prediction, they don't reveal the exact kinds of social interactions happened among people and how the social interactions affect the decision-making process of pedestrians, which further limits its robustness. Social interactions in pedestrian walking are intuitively massive and hard to label and quantify. In this paper, we explore creatively to quantify and interpret how pedestrians interact with others by proposing Learn to Cluster. Our clustering social interactions is probabilistic latent variable generative, learning directly from sequential trajectory observations, scalable to arbitrary number of pedestrians. Learn to cluster is label-free and can be naturally integrated into the training process of the prediction model. The latent variables will then serve as 'labels' to categorize social interactions. Extensive experiments over several trajectory prediction benchmarks demonstrate that our method is able to learn the patterns of social interactions and effectively integrate the patterns to pedestrian trajectory prediction.

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

No-deleting principle for two unitary copies

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pati and Braunstein defined a deleting machine and showed the impossibility of deleting one of two identical copies of an unknown quantum state. So far, no one has defined two non-identical copies of a quantum state, of course no one has discussed the impossibility of deleting one of two non-identical copies of an unknown quantum state. In this paper, we define $u|{\psi}>$ and $U|{\psi}>$, where $u$ and $U$ are any unitary operators, as two unitary copies of a quantum state $|{\psi}>$, and show that it is impossible to delete one of two unitary copies of an unknown state.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Data Augmentation: A Fourier Analysis Perspective

arXiv:2606.24418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data augmentation is a simple and model-agnostic approach for exploiting known invariances in learning problems. Given a group acting on the input space, one augments the training set with transformed copies of each sample. Because it exploits symmetries without modifying the underlying learning algorithm, data augmentation can be applied broadly across learning methods. However, this universality comes at a computational cost: when the group is large, full group-sized augmentation quickly becomes computationally infeasible. This raises a fundamental question: Can partial data augmentation achieve the same statistical benefits as full augmentation in terms of generalization and sample complexity? We develop a general framework for investigating this question using Fourier analysis and the representation theory of finite groups. We show that, for a broad class of classical learning problems, partial data augmentation based on a randomly sampled subset of group elements achieves the same minimax rates as full augmentation, up to an approximation error that vanishes as the subset size increases. Our results provide a theoretical explanation for why partial augmentation can retain the statistical benefits of full augmentation despite enforcing symmetry only approximately, and shed light on a recently raised question in learning with symmetries: whether statistically optimal learning under general group invariances can be achieved using computationally scalable methods. Moreover, we prove a complementary impossibility result: enforcing exact invariance via data augmentation requires averaging over the entire group, and cannot be achieved by any strict subset when the hypothesis space is sufficiently expressive. Together, these results provide a unified perspective on full and partial data augmentation, as well as exact and approximate symmetry enforcement.

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

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

arXiv:2606.11652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Link between Shock-wave Theory and Symmetry-reduced Stochastic Gradient Descent for Artificial Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.18303v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a mathematically explicit link between shock-wave theory and the symmetry-quotiented learning dynamics of stochastic gradient descent, drawing on differential geometry, Lie group theory, and fluid mechanics. Specifically, after quotienting parameter symmetries and applying local-entropy coarse-graining, the effective dynamics satisfy a viscous Hamilton–Jacobi equation on the quotient manifold. Moreover, under the assumption that the raw parameter dynamics can be summarized by a gradient field on the quotiented space, the gradient of the coarse-grained loss function obeys a Burgers-type equation, and shock formation can be established rigorously. We apply our theory to multilayer perceptrons, convolutional neural networks, Transformers, and mean-field networks, and show that they obey the Hamilton–Jacobi or Burgers-type equations. We conjecture that this framework also yields practical diagnostics for deep learning. In architectures such as Transformers, raw parameter norms are often distorted by symmetry redundancy and may therefore be misleading, whereas symmetry-corrected quotient observables provide a principled basis for monitoring, forecasting, and controlling training-phase transitions.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Embedded Arena: Iterative Optimization via Hardware Feedback

arXiv:2606.16190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embedded devices from wildlife monitoring stations to clinical wearables require local AI inference due to latency, communication, or privacy constraints. Optimizing models for heterogeneous microcontrollers (MCUs) requires simultaneously satisfying hard physical constraints on memory, power, and temperature while preserving accuracy, a multidimensional optimization that is today performed manually by experts. We ask whether an LLM agent can autonomously navigate this complex, multi-turn pipeline guided by real hardware feedback, and introduce a hardware-in-the-loop agent arena in which the agent iteratively refines both model and firmware – compiling, flashing, and measuring on real hardware – to enable closed-loop optimization. Frontier models, including Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro, fail entirely without hardware feedback (0% deployment success), whereas our hardware-in-the-loop formulation achieves the first successful deployment within three iterations and can surpass human expert results within seven. This agentic co-optimization achieves 250x compression for vision models with

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum deformations of $\mathcal{U}(\mathfrak{sl}(2, \mathbb{R}))$. Part I: Fidelity and experimental benchmarking

arXiv:2606.19462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work explores the effects of both the standard quantum $q$-deformation and the non-standard $h$-deformation of the Hopf algebra $\mathcal{U}(\mathfrak{sl}(2, \mathbb{R}))$ on multi-qubit systems. By constructing the states of a Hilbert space of $N$ qubits through the Clebsch-Gordan coefficients associated with the deformed algebras, we show that these states naturally coincide with the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian of the $q$- and $h$-deformed Kittel-Shore models. We compare the resulting deformed states with those typically targeted in quantum information experiments, providing a bridge between algebraic constructions and experimentally relevant quantum resources. Fidelities with respect to the undeformed states are computed to establish how the quantum correlations are affected, both for few-qubit systems (including Dicke and non-Dicke states), and in the macroscopic limit ($N \to \infty$) through closed-form formulas derived for arbitrary Dicke states. The results reveal different behaviors between the two deformations. The $q$-deformation smoothly modifies the states and maintains a residual overlap with the original configurations, while the $h$-deformation rapidly makes the states orthogonal to their undeformed counterparts. Both models demand a standard $N^{-1}$ rescaling to preserve fidelity stability in the macroscopic limit.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

EMS: Multi-Agent Voting via Efficient Majority-then-Stopping

arXiv:2604.02863v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Majority voting is the standard for aggregating multi-agent responses into a final decision. However, traditional methods typically require all agents to complete their reasoning before aggregation begins, leading to significant computational overhead, as many responses become redundant once a majority consensus is achieved. In this work, we formulate efficient multi-agent voting as a reliability-aware agent scheduling problem and propose Efficient Majority-then-Stopping (EMS) to improve reasoning efficiency. EMS first estimates a Task-Conditioned Reliability Ordering (TCRO) for each agent by retrieving its historical consensus evidence on semantically similar queries, and then invoking agents in descending reliability order. Next, Adaptive Incremental Voting (AIV) terminates the process once the current leading answer cannot be overturned by any possible votes from the remaining agents, and returns this answer. Finally, Reliability History Updating (RHU) updates only the invoked agents according to their consensus with the final decision. Extensive evaluations across five benchmarks show that EMS preserves the accuracy of Majority Voting while reducing the average number of invoked agents by 35% and token consumption by 44%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/fuyu66/EMS.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

OpenAnt: LLM-Powered Vulnerability Discovery Through Code Decomposition, Adversarial Verification, and Dynamic Testing

arXiv:2606.19149v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated vulnerability discovery in large codebases remains challenging: traditional static analysis produces high false-positive rates, while dynamic approaches such as fuzzing require substantial infrastructure and often target narrow classes of bugs. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable semantic reasoning about program behavior, but applying LLMs to repository-scale security analysis introduces challenges related to context management, cost, and verification. We present OpenAnt, an open-source vulnerability discovery system that integrates static program analysis with LLM-based reasoning in a multi-stage pipeline. OpenAnt introduces three key techniques. First, codebases are decomposed into self-contained analysis units filtered by reachability from external entry points, reducing the analysis surface by up to 97% while preserving attack-relevant code. Second, candidate vulnerabilities undergo adversarial verification through constrained attacker simulation, where the model evaluates exploitability under realistic attacker capabilities. Third, findings are validated through dynamic verification, in which exploit environments are generated automatically, executed in sandboxed containers, and discarded after use. Evaluation on widely used open-source projects including OpenSSL, WordPress, and Flowise shows that this architecture can identify previously unknown vulnerabilities while maintaining manageable analysis cost and substantially reducing false positives. Our results suggest that closed-loop vulnerability discovery pipelines, combining semantic reasoning with exploit validation, provide a practical path toward scalable automated security analysis. OpenAnt is released as open source under the Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/knostic/OpenAnt.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Long-term exposure to PM2.5 components and lipid profiles in WTC Health Program general responders

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) was found to be associated with elevated blood lipids, but fewer studies have examined the associations with specific constituents of PM2.5. We studied the associations between exposure to annual PM2.5 and its 14 constituents, and repeated blood lipid measurements among general responders enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program between 2003 and 2019 (n = 44,876). We used generalized additive mixed effect models to investigate the single-pollutant associations with repeated measures of blood total cholesterol (TC), high and low-density lipoprotein (HDL-C and LDL-C) levels. We then used linear generalized weighted quantile sum regression with a random intercept for participant ID to account for the clustering of repeated measures and evaluate the combined associations with the component mixture. A decile increase in the mixture of 14 PM2.5 chemical components was associated with 0.375 mg/dL increase in TC levels (95% confidence Interval (CI): 0.174-0.577) and 0.302 mg/dL increase in LDL-C (95% CI: 0.063, 0.540). Lead, organic carbon, and iron were major drivers of both associations. Component-specific models also show higher TC and LDL levels associated with interquartile range increases in organic carbon (0.472, 95% CI [0.027, 0.918] and 0.648 95% CI [0.136, 1.160]) and iron exposure (1.081, 95% CI [0.630, 1.532] and 0.748, 95% CI [0.318, 1.178]). In conclusion, we found PM2.5 exposure to be associated with elevated lipid levels. The associations differed by PM2.5 composition, highlighting organic carbon, lead, and iron and major drivers. These findings are highly significant for a population exposed to extreme air pollution event and susceptible to lipid alterations that might trigger cardiovascular events.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

S3OD: Towards Generalizable Salient Object Detection with Synthetic Data

Salient object detection exemplifies data-bounded tasks where expensive pixel-precise annotations force separate model training for related subtasks like DIS and HR-SOD. We present a method that dramatically improves generalization through large-scale synthetic data generation and ambiguity-aware architecture. We introduce S3OD, a dataset of over 139,000 high-resolution images created through our multi-modal diffusion pipeline that extracts labels from diffusion and DINO-v3 features. The iterative generation framework prioritizes challenging categories based on model performance. We propose a streamlined multi-mask decoder that handles the inherent ambiguity in salient object detection by predicting multiple valid interpretations. Models trained only on synthetic data achieve 20-50% error reduction in cross-dataset generalization, while fine-tuned versions reach state-of-the-art performance across DIS and HR-SOD benchmarks.

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

Data Standards for Humanoid Robotics: The Missing Infrastructure for Physical AI

arXiv:2606.19769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The scalability of humanoid robots will depend not only on models and hardware, but also on whether physical experience can accumulate across robots, tasks, organizations, and time. Drawing on the authors' work in developing ISO/WD 26264-1, Humanoid robot datasets – Part 1: General requirements, within ISO/TC 299/WG 16, this article argues that data standards are becoming foundational infrastructure for Physical AI. We develop three insights. First, humanoid robot data is embodied interaction data, not a collection of isolated digital samples; a useful dataset must preserve the relationship among robot body, action, task, scene, execution trace, and outcome. Second, its value depends on physical coherence: multimodal streams are reusable only when timing, coordinate frames, calibration, kinematics, units, and synchronization assumptions remain inspectable. Third, the main bottleneck is not only data scarcity, but non-cumulative data caused by high collection costs, data silos, and inconsistent evaluation. We argue that humanoid robot data standards address these bottlenecks by making embodied experience interpretable, shareable, traceable, and reusable. A general standard should provide horizontal infrastructure for lifecycle management, metadata, provenance, quality, versioning, and traceability, while capability-specific parts should define domain grammar for manipulation, locomotion, human-robot interaction, cognition, and future humanoid capabilities. As AI moves from screens into bodies, data standards must evolve from organizing digital information to structuring physical interaction.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

NeuroSonic: Conditional Flow Matching for EEG-to-Speech Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.24087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reconstructing continuous speech from scalp electroencephalography (EEG) remains fundamentally challenging. EEG provides a weak, spatially diffuse, and highly variable measurement of distributed cortical activity, whereas speech is organized as a coherent acoustic trajectory with strong harmonic and temporal structure. The resulting mismatch makes waveform regression unstable and causes stochastic multi-step generation to be sensitive to artifact-dependent conditioning and subject variability. We introduce NeuroSonic, a conditional flow-matching framework for EEG-to-speech reconstruction. Instead of predicting waveforms directly or refining them through stochastic denoising, NeuroSonic learns a deterministic probability-flow velocity field that transports a noise-corrupted acoustic state toward clean speech under EEG conditioning. EEG and audio are embedded into a shared token space and processed by a time-conditioned gated Transformer that parameterizes the transport ordinary differential equation. This formulation models trajectory evolution explicitly while avoiding iterative stochastic sampling. We evaluate NeuroSonic on the CineBrain and EAV benchmarks under cross-subject evaluation. Across both datasets, the proposed method improves distributional realism, spectral fidelity, and perceptual quality over representative GAN-, diffusion-, and mean-flow baselines, with up to a 26.3\% gain in overall perceptual quality. The performance gap is most evident in artifact-heavy segments, where conditioning variability is strongest. These findings indicate that deterministic conditional transport provides a stable and effective formulation for EEG-driven speech reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/Y-Research-SBU/NeuroSonic/ .

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

Augmentation techniques for video surveillance in the visible and thermal spectral range

In intelligent video surveillance, cameras record image sequences during day and night. Commonly, this demands different sensors. To achieve a better performance it is not unusual to combine them. We focus on the case that a long-wave infrared camera records continuously and in addition to this, another camera records in the visible spectral range during daytime and an intelligent algorithm supervises the picked up imagery. More accurate, our task is multispectral CNN-based object detection. At first glance, images originating from the visible spectral range differ between thermal infrared ones in the presence of color and distinct texture information on the one hand and in not containing information about thermal radiation that emits from objects on the other hand. Although color can provide valuable information for classification tasks, effects such as varying illumination and specialties of different sensors still represent significant problems. Anyway, obtaining sufficient and practical thermal infrared datasets for training a deep neural network poses still a challenge. That is the reason why training with the help of data from the visible spectral range could be advantageous, particularly if the data, which has to be evaluated contains both visible and infrared data. However, there is no clear evidence of how strongly variations in thermal radiation, shape, or color information influence classification accuracy. To gain deeper insight into how Convolutional Neural Networks make decisions and what they learn from different sensor input data, we investigate the suitability and robustness of different augmentation techniques...

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Landscape-Similarity-Guided Optimization in Divide-and-Conquer QAOA

arXiv:2602.21689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Divide-and-conquer strategies mitigate hardware constraints for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices by partitioning large interaction graphs into smaller, hardware-compatible sub-problems. However, this approach introduces a severe classical training bottleneck: a decomposition across $m$ boundary nodes generates $2^m$ distinct sub-problems that typically require independent optimization. In this work, we demonstrate that across diverse synthetic and real-world interaction graphs, the variational landscapes of these reduced QAOA instances actually exhibit a robust universality. Adapting the replica-overlap framework of spin-glass physics, we define a landscape-overlap order parameter $q$ to quantify geometric correlations between energy landscapes, revealing a sharp landscape-similarity transition as graph connectivity is tuned. Exploiting this, we introduce Doubly Optimized QAOA (DO-QAOA), an adaptive pipeline that collapses the sub-problems from $2^m$ distinct sub-problems into $K=\mathcal{O}(1)$ effective landscape classes. By performing optimization on a single representative sub-problem and dynamically transferring parameters to remaining sub-problems, DO-QAOA lowers runtime and quantum measurement overhead by orders of magnitude while maintaining a competitive Approximation Ratio Gap (ARG).

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

WebSP-Eval: Evaluating Web Agents on Website Security and Privacy Tasks

arXiv:2604.06367v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Web agents automate browser tasks, ranging from simple form completion to complex workflows like ordering groceries. While current benchmarks evaluate general-purpose performance~(e.g., WebArena) or safety against malicious actions~(e.g., SafeArena), no existing framework assesses an agent's ability to successfully execute user-facing website security and privacy tasks, such as managing cookie preferences, configuring privacy-sensitive account settings, or revoking inactive sessions. To address this gap, we introduce WebSP-Eval, an evaluation framework for measuring web agent performance on website security and privacy tasks. WebSP-Eval comprises 1) a manually crafted task dataset of 200 task instances across 28 websites; 2) a robust agentic system supporting account and initial state management across runs using a custom Google Chrome extension; and 3) an automated evaluator. We evaluate a total of 8 web agent instantiations using state-of-the-art multimodal large language models, conducting a fine-grained analysis across websites, task categories, and UI elements. Our evaluation reveals that current models suffer from limited autonomous exploration capabilities to reliably solve website security and privacy tasks, and struggle with specific task categories and websites. Crucially, we identify stateful UI elements are a primary reason for agent failure, with toggles causing more than 45% task failure across many models.

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

From Persistence to Survival: Hypothesis Testing, Effect Sizes and Vectorisation for Topological Features

arXiv:2606.11911v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persistence diagrams are common representations in topological data analysis, but they do not naturally live in a vector space, and the statistical tools developed for comparing them have largely evolved separately from those used for downstream prediction. We introduce STRAND (Survival Topological Representation ANalysis of Diagrams), which treats (collections of) PDs as survival data: each topological feature with persistence value $p = d - b$ is a fully observed time-to-event, and the persistence survival function $S(t) = \mathbb{P}(p > t)$ is the central object for comparing diagrams. From this single representation we derive (i) a non-parametric two-sample test with calibrated Type I error and high power from a small number of diagrams; (ii) interpretable effect sizes; and (iii) a 1-Wasserstein-stable feature vector for downstream machine learning. We validate calibration and power on synthetic manifolds with controlled topology, demonstrate competitive vectorisation across 14 graph and 3D point cloud benchmarks, and apply the method to study functional brain connectivity in fMRI/neuroscience data. To our knowledge, STRAND is the first method to provide hypothesis testing and vectorisation for persistence diagrams from a single coherent and interpretable representation.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

How Much Capacity Does EEG Denoising Need? Ultra-Compact Networks reveal Benchmark Saturation and Metric-Utility Gap

arXiv:2606.08594v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep learning EEG denoising architectures have scaled from tens of thousands to tens of millions of parameters, yet no prior study has isolated model capacity as the experimental variable or tested whether reconstruction metrics predict downstream neural-signal utility. We address both gaps by fixing architecture, loss, data split, and training recipe while sweeping only channel width from 1.05K to 40.26K parameters in a minimal depthwise-separable convolutional U-Net. Models were evaluated on the EEGDenoiseNet benchmark, cross-dataset BCI transfer tests, controlled baseline retraining, and downstream motor-imagery classification with five decoder families across all nine BCI Competition IV-2a subjects. Reconstruction performance saturated by 3-6.5K parameters, with post-elbow gains of at most 0.015 correlation coefficient per log10-parameter unit. An 8.46M-parameter baseline retrained under the same pipeline matched the 40.26K compact variant on EOG–a 200x parameter gap yielding no advantage–while a Patch-Transformer control reproduced the same diminishing-return shape. Downstream evaluation exposed a classifier-dependent metric-utility gap: reconstruction-optimized denoising significantly degraded CSP+LDA classification across all nine subjects and three artifact types (best denoised accuracy 0.547 vs. 0.612 noisy baseline; Bonferroni p=0.0488), persisting on naturally recorded trials (Delta=-0.047; BH-FDR q=0.0049). End-to-end neural decoders showed variable or neutral effects. Standard EEG denoising benchmarks are saturated far below current model capacity, and reconstruction metrics do not predict BCI utility. Ultra-compact models at 33-46 KB and 1.27-2.61M FLOPs/segment are practical for edge deployment. These findings argue for capacity-controlled evaluation, harder task-aware benchmarks, and mandatory downstream validation.

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

The Linguistics Olympiads: Towards a New Corpus for Linguistics Research?

Linguistics olympiad problems (LOPs) are a category of self-sufficient puzzles consisting of a scaled-down corpus representative of certain linguistic phenomena, from which the solver must deduce a primitive set of rules of the language and then translate a new set of elements. The linguistics olympiads (LOs) have become a worldwide phenomenon with 43 different territories taking part in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) 2025. While the typology and solving strategies of LOPs have been analysed, their scientific facet and connections to academic linguistics have yet to be explored. LOPs are directly connected to many linguistic fields, e.g., linguistic typology, linguistic relativity, and linguistics fieldwork. Recently, LOPs have become a research focus as benchmarks for large language models, thus highlighting their usefulness in computational linguistics. Nevertheless, they have not yet been integrated into mainstream linguistics research. This paper attempts to open new directions of including this particular type of puzzle in academic research by offering a structured evaluation of LOPs as linguistic data sources and proposes criteria for their responsible use in academic research. Starting from a set of over 1800 LOPs, this study critically examines the potential of LOPs as a novel corpus for linguistics research by discussing their strengths and limitations as tools, as well as the areas of linguistics into which these problems could fit. This work forms the foundation for a broader initiative aimed at bridging the gap between LOs and academic linguistics, by establishing a robust theoretical framework for LOPs.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

Generative Modeling of Mouse Embryogenesis for Fate and Disease Prediction

Embryonic development is orchestrated by complex gene regulatory networks, and learning regulatory dynamics from developmental data could allow us to understand, predict, and ultimately engineer cell fates. Here we introduce Navigo (https://github.com/aristoteleo/Navigo-release), a biologically grounded generative modeling framework that learns a developmental vector field by integrating flow matching at the population level with RNA kinetics modeling at the molecular level. Navigo accurately maps developmental trajectories across lineages on a mouse embryogenesis scRNA-seq atlas spanning 43 time points and comprising 12.4 million cells. Applied to cardiac development, Navigo enables disease modeling by mechanistically resolving regulatory networks that distinguish congenital heart disease subtypes. Navigo also predicts perturbation effects in a zero-shot manner, as validated on independent in vivo data from six knockout genotypes without perturbation-specific training, uncovering lineage-specific gene-compensation mechanisms. Moreover, Navigo guides rational cell-fate engineering, exemplified by fibroblast reprogramming analyses, including identifying pro-fibrotic barriers to cardiac fates and evaluating hundreds of pairwise transcription factor combinations for neuronal fate, each consisting of one bHLH factor and one POU factor. Overall, Navigo provides a generalizable AI platform for perturbation-effect prediction, disease modeling, and rational cell-fate engineering, advancing toward AI-based virtual embryos for developmental biology and regenerative medicine.

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

Mind the Perspective: Let's Reason Recursively for Theory of Mind

arXiv:2606.11724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning requires inferring agents' beliefs from partial and asymmetric observations, which remains an open challenge for LLMs. Existing prompting-based approaches improve ToM reasoning through observable-event filtering or temporal belief chains, without explicitly modeling nested beliefs. We introduce RecToM, an inference-time framework for ToM reasoning that models nested beliefs via recursive perspective construction. RecToM constructs each character perspective from the preceding character perspective along the character chain specified by the question, reducing higher-order belief questions to actual-world questions within the final constructed perspective. We further provide a KD45 analysis showing that RecToM's perspective construction induces a well-formed belief modality beyond simple event filtering. Experiments on ToM benchmarks, including Hi-ToM, Big-ToM, and FanToM, across multiple LLM backbones show that RecToM consistently outperforms recent advanced approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Notably, RecToM reaches 100\% accuracy on Hi-ToM with GPT-5.4 and Qwen3.5, a benchmark requiring higher-order ToM reasoning.