Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Simultaneous Estimation of Partial-Transpose Moments with Active Memory Independent of the Moment Order

arXiv:2606.14204v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the simultaneous estimation of partial-transpose moments $p_j(\rho_{AB})=\mathrm{Tr}[(\rho_{AB}^{T_B})^j]$, $j=2,\ldots,K$, of an unknown bipartite $n$-qubit state from independent copies under an explicit active-memory constraint. We give a sequential qubit-reuse realization of the partial-transpose permutation that uses at most $2n+1$ active qubits, independent of $K$, and estimates all moments $p_2,\ldots,p_K$ to uniform additive error $\epsilon$ with total copy complexity $O(K\log K/\epsilon^2)$. We also prove two converse bounds. First, any uniformly accurate simultaneous estimator requires $\Omega(K/\epsilon^2)$ copies in the worst case. Second, the same scaling holds on an explicit isospectral two-qubit negative-partial-transpose (NPT) family whose ordinary moments are constant while the partial-transpose moments vary. These results characterize the copy complexity of the partial-transpose moment hierarchy up to a logarithmic factor and extend simultaneous nonlinear-functional estimation from ordinary state powers to partial-transpose spectral data under active quantum memory independent of the target moment order.

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

Active Inference with a Self-Prior in the Mirror-Mark Task

arXiv:2604.09673v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The mirror self-recognition test evaluates whether a subject touches a mark on its own body that is visible only in a mirror, and is widely used as an indicator of self-awareness. In this study, we present a computational model in which this behavior emerges spontaneously through a single mechanism, the self-prior, without any external reward. The self-prior, implemented with a Transformer, learns the density of familiar multisensory experiences; when a novel mark appears, the discrepancy from this learned distribution drives mark-directed behavior through active inference. A simulated infant, relying solely on vision and proprioception without tactile input, discovered a sticker placed on its own face in the mirror and removed it in approximately 70% of cases without any explicit instruction. Expected free energy decreased significantly after sticker removal, confirming that the self-prior operates as an internal criterion for distinguishing self from non-self. Cross-modal sampling further demonstrated that the self-prior captures visual–proprioceptive associations, functioning as a probabilistic body schema. These results provide a concise computational account of the key behavior observed in the mirror test and suggest that the free energy principle can serve as a unifying hypothesis for investigating the developmental origins of self-awareness. Code is available at: https://github.com/kim135797531/self-prior-mirror

03.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-12

Comparison of count-based and clustering definitions of multimorbidity and their association with prevalence of multimorbidity, health profiles, and mortality: A cohort study of UK Biobank participants

by Gabriella C. Silva, Aurore Fayosse, Louis Jacob, Séverine Sabia, Archana Singh-Manoux, Benjamin Landré Background Multimorbidity, the presence of several chronic conditions, is linked to higher mortality and healthcare use and thus poses a major challenge for aging populations. While most studies rely on simple counts of conditions, clustering approaches have been proposed to describe patterns of co-occurring diseases. We aimed to evaluate the extent to which these methodological choices influence prevalence and association with health profiles and mortality. Methods and findings Using UK Biobank baseline data (n = 474,397), collected between 2006 and 2010, we compared six count-based definitions of multimorbidity based on different condition lists (extended, most prevalent, or body systems) and thresholds (≥2 versus ≥3 conditions). We also applied a clustering analysis to characterize subtypes of multimorbidity among participants with at least two chronic conditions. We compared prevalence and associations with concurrent health outcomes (polypharmacy, self-rated health, frailty, falls, surgery, chronic pain), blood-based measures (C-reactive protein, Cystatin-C, HDL, LDL Cholesterol, IGF-1), and 3- and 10-year mortality risks. Analyses were undertaken separately in men and women using multivariable regression models adjusted for sociodemographic characteristics and body mass index. Multimorbidity prevalence ranged from 1.0% (cluster-based) to 35.3% (count-based). Count-based definitions using lists with more conditions yielded higher prevalence. Higher thresholds identified more severe health profiles on all measured health outcomes, blood-based measures, but not higher mortality risks. Associations with blood-based measures were more pronounced using clustering, with the highest differences from the standard definition distributed across clusters. Odds ratios for 3-year mortality ranged from 1.44 [1.26; 1.64] to 4.60 [3.73; 5.62] for men and 1.35 [1.07; 1.69] to 3.83 [2.78; 5.14] for women. For 10-year mortality, they ranged from 1.42 [1.34; 1.50] to 3.86 [3.46; 4.30] in men and 1.29 [1.21; 1.39] to 3.33 [2.93; 3.77] for women, with clustering identifying groups with low prevalence and high mortality risks. Findings should be interpreted in light of the selected nature of the UK Biobank cohort and the cross-sectional assessment of several health indicators. Conclusion Operational definitions of multimorbidity substantially influence prevalence estimates, while associations with mortality appear more robust across count-based approaches. Clustering analyses provide complementary insights into heterogeneity within multimorbid populations. Future translational studies are warranted to determine how multimorbidity definitions can be optimized to ultimately improve clinical management and health outcomes in practice.

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

BIM-Edit: Benchmarking Large Language Models for IFC-Based Building Information Modeling

arXiv:2606.20146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to computer-aided design (CAD) to generate design artifacts from textual instructions. In engineering practice, this requires more than creating new geometry, models must also understand existing scenes, edit them correctly, and preserve semantics and relations. However, many CAD benchmarks focus on creating new models rather than editing existing ones, and mostly evaluate geometric correctness. We introduce BIM-Edit, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs on natural-language editing of Building Information Models (BIM) represented in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) format. BIM provides a challenging testbed because building models encode geometry together with semantic and relational structure. BIM-Edit contains 324 editing tasks spanning 11 realistic building models and 36 synthetic scenes. Tasks are expressed using three instruction categories - direct, spatial, and topological - covering both explicit and scene-grounded edits. We evaluate outputs along three dimensions: geometric accuracy, semantic validity, and topological consistency. Across evaluated LLMs, the best-performing model achieves only 49.5% average score across the three metrics, and no model fully solves more than 3.4% of tasks. These results demonstrate a substantial gap between current LLM capabilities and the requirements of structured engineering design workflows.

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

Augmenting Game AI with Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Immersion in video games depends not only on graphics, audio, and game mechanics, but also on the quality of in-game characters. Producing believable characters, or game AI, remains a significant challenge as behavioral complexity is hard to capture with hand-coded systems. Game AI is a source of immersion and engagement; however, the limitations stemming from the challenges of creating game AI often lead to frustration and the breaking of the illusion of realism within the game. The introduction of machine learning models opens the door to creating more believable, authentic, and relatable characters in games. The promise is that they either learn from interacting with the game, or from player data, to develop true human-like behavior. In this paper, we envision more applications of reinforcement learning for game AI in the future. For this to materialize, current research limitations are prohibitive to broad deployment across game genres. Therefore, we propose a framework for training reinforcement learning models with a set of requirements in mind that are suited towards game AI and game development. We present examples of games with reinforcement learning-augmented game AI and describe the practicalities of deploying player-facing machine learning agents in modern games. Furthermore, we identify bottlenecks and hard problems in these areas, which we believe offer promising research directions to accelerate the adoption of machine learning in game AI for the video game industry.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

On-site interactions in quantum thermal machines: efficiency, rectification and entanglement beyond local and global master equations

arXiv:2606.14593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in experimental techniques have opened new routes for harnessing non-equilibrium dynamics in mesoscopic quantum systems. In this context, we study the impact of on-site interactions on the transport properties of a continuous quantum thermal machine composed of two coupled oscillators connected to two thermal reservoirs. In the weak system-reservoir coupling regime, where a long-standing debate concerns which reduced description should be preferred, we first show that the Redfield master equation (RME) provides an accurate and unifying framework that interpolates between two well-known limits: the local and global master equations. By relying on the Hierarchy of Pure States (HOPS), a numerically exact stochastic method, we then explore the full parameter space and show that interactions can be leveraged to tune the efficiency of the thermal machine at high temperatures (while leaving it essentially unchanged at low temperatures), induce non-reciprocal transport under asymmetric reservoir couplings, and generate steady-state entanglement within the junction. We derive expressions for system-bath correlators, such as heat and particle currents, consistently across different frameworks. Our work features on-site interactions to enhance the versatility of quantum thermodynamic junctions and clarifies the role of non-Markovianity and non-linearities in quantum transport.

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

From 50K to 8.2 Million in 24 Hours: Vozinha's Algorithmic Consecration and the Multilingual Making of World Cup Visibility

We present a multilingual computational discourse analysis of how language constructed the algorithmic consecration of Vozinha, the 40-year-old Cape Verde goalkeeper, after Spain 0-0 Cape Verde at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The study contributes a multilingual corpus in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French; a nine-frame narrative taxonomy with cue-based frame annotation; a reproducible annotation pipeline combining LLM-assisted suggestion with human validation; and an analysis of cross-lingual narrative diffusion across discourse phases. We treat the platform follower count itself, narrated as "50k to 8M", as a linguistic object: a circulating and narratable proof of visibility rather than a mere measurement. The follower-growth timeline is used only as contextual metadata: we reconstruct a conservative phase structure, not a continuous API-native series, and type every datapoint by value class, confidence, and evidence type. The only exact primary scraper anchor is 8,235,652 followers at 2026-06-16 15:47 UTC; all other figures are reported as estimated ranges or thresholds, including an estimated pre-match baseline of 45k-56k. Findings suggest that distinct languages carried distinct frames: Portuguese mobilization, Spanish crisis, English nation-making, and a shared platform-metric spectacle through which peripheral athletic performance became globally visible. As a v0.1 pilot, the paper releases the corpus schema, frame taxonomy, annotation guidelines, hashed visual-evidence log, and typed timeline, while flagging full double annotation and inter-annotator agreement as planned work.

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

Can Agents Distinguish Visually Hard-to-Separate Diseases in a Zero-Shot Setting? A Pilot Study

The rapid progress of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has led to increasing interest in agent-based systems. While most prior work in medical imaging concentrates on automating routine clinical workflows, we study an underexplored yet clinically significant setting: distinguishing visually hard-to-separate diseases in a zero-shot setting. We benchmark representative agents on two imaging-only proxy diagnostic tasks, (1) melanoma vs. atypical nevus and (2) pulmonary edema vs. pneumonia, where visual features are highly confounded despite substantial differences in clinical management. We introduce a multi-agent framework based on contrastive adjudication. Experimental results show improved diagnostic performance (an 11-percentage-point gain in accuracy on dermoscopy data) and reduced unsupported claims on qualitative samples, although overall performance remains insufficient for clinical deployment. We acknowledge the inherent uncertainty in human annotations and the absence of clinical context, which further limit the translation to real-world settings. Within this controlled setting, this pilot study provides preliminary insights into zero-shot agent performance in visually confounded scenarios.

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

ORCA: A Platform for Open-Source Dexterity Research

arXiv:2606.14561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotics manipulation research increasingly focuses on two-finger parallel grippers for their effectiveness, affordability, and ease of teleoperation. Grippers are nonetheless limited by their form factor, often requiring bimanual setups even for simple reorientation tasks. Anthropomorphic hands are a more natural platform for dexterous robot learning – closer to the human hand, and capable of learning from human video – yet they remain hard to use in learning research: even where open and accessible hand hardware exists, the software for control, simulation, teleoperation, and retargeting is scattered in one-off code bases, and largely disconnected from the robot-learning ecosystem. In this work, we introduce the \orca~learning stack, an open-source research stack for dexterity as a first-class robot learning domain. Our \orca~stack unifies low-level control, simulation, teleoperation from a range of consumer platforms, and hand retargeting, behind a single interface, and integrates natively with popular robot-learning frameworks such as \lerobot, so dexterous hand researchers can leverage the same data, training, and evaluation pipelines used for non-dexterous robot learning. We demonstrate a complete end-to-end workflow, collecting expert demonstrations of an in-hand reorientation task by teleoperation with a consumer-grade VR headset, training an autonomous policy with \lerobot, and evaluating the learned policy in a fully reproducible and observable setup. We open-source the entire stack as a shared, reproducible foundation for dexterous-manipulation research.

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

VideoMDM: Towards 3D Human Motion Generation From 2D Supervision

We introduce VideoMDM, a diffusion-based framework that trains 3D human motion priors directly from accurate 2D poses extracted from monocular videos, without any 3D ground truth. A pretrained 2D-to-3D lifter provides approximate 3D pose sequences that serve as a noisy teacher: these are diffused, denoised by the model in 3D, and supervised in 2D by reprojecting the prediction and comparing against accurate keypoints. We show that, under mild assumptions, a depth-weighted 2D reprojection loss is equivalent in expectation to direct 3D supervision, and we adapt standard 3D motion regularizers - velocity consistency and over-parameterized representation alignment - to this 2D setting. Unlike methods that lift 2D to 3D only at inference, VideoMDM learns a coherent 3D motion manifold during training. On HumanML3D it nearly closes the gap to fully 3D-supervised MDM (FID 0.88 vs 0.54); On real video datasets Fit3D and NBA the method learns to generate motions consistently preferred by humans, with strong quantitative results.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DiFlow-TTS: Compact and Low-Latency Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Discrete Flow Matching

Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) has made significant progress in replicating unseen voices, yet balancing generation quality and inference efficiency remains challenging. Autoregressive models suffer from high latency, while diffusion-based approaches are constrained by training-time configurations. Moreover, most flow-based methods operate in continuous space, which introduces optimization challenges because continuous token spaces are inherently more complex than discrete ones. To address these limitations, we propose DiFlow-TTS, a novel zero-shot TTS framework based on discrete flow matching. The model consists of a deterministic Phoneme-Content Mapper for linguistic modeling and a Factorized Discrete Flow Denoiser that simultaneously generates prosody and acoustic token streams. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple evaluation metrics.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Semiclassical limit of Polyakov-Liouville measure and Q-Curvature Uniformization on evev-dimensional manifolds

arXiv:2606.14443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the semiclassical limit of the Polyakov-Liouville measure $\boldsymbol{\nu}_\gamma$, which is a non-Gaussian measure on $H^{-\eps}(M)$ that has recently been extended from Riemann surfaces to general Riemannian manifolds $(M,g)$ of even dimension. We show that under an appropriate rescaling in the semiclassical limit as $\gamma\to0$, the normalized Polyakov-Liouville measure $\Q_\gamma$ concentrates on the unique smooth weight $u$ for which the conformal metric $e^{2u}g$ on $M$ has constant $Q$-curvature.

16.
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.

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

ReSET: Accurate Latency-Critical NVFP4 Reasoning via Step-Aware Temperature Scaling

arXiv:2606.13233v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) improve complex problem-solving by generating long intermediate reasoning traces, but this substantially increases inference costs. NVFP4 inference offers a promising approach to reduce both computational and memory costs through hardware-supported low-precision execution. However, directly applying NVFP4 to LRMs introduces two practical limitations: reasoning accuracy degrades under quantization, and existing NVFP4 kernels do not fully realize latency benefits in small-batch autoregressive decoding. In this work, we analyze the effect of NVFP4 quantization on token-level uncertainty during reasoning. We show that quantization increases incorrect sampling at low-entropy symbolic tokens, while causing over-concentration on a small set of tokens in high-uncertainty reasoning steps. Based on this observation, we propose ReSET, a reasoning-step entropy-based temperature-scaling method that estimates step-level uncertainty online and adapts the decoding temperature using both token-level and step-level entropy signals. To address the latency gap, we further design a CUDA-core small-$M$ NVFP4 kernel for latency-critical autoregressive decoding. Across reasoning benchmarks and model scales, ReSET improves NVFP4 reasoning accuracy by up to $\sim\!$2 points over the NVFP4 baseline. Our CUDA-core small-$M$ kernel further improves latency-critical decoding, delivering up to $2.5\!\times$ kernel-level speedup over NVFP4 vLLM and approximately $2\!\times$ end-to-end decoding speedup over BF16. Code is available at https://github.com/aiha-lab/ReSET.

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

TreeSeeker: Tree-Structured Trial, Error, and Return in Deep Search

arXiv:2606.11662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep search requires agents to answer complex questions through multi-step web search, browsing, evidence comparison, and synthesis. A central challenge is deciding how to search when several directions look plausible but only some will later lead to reliable evidence. If an agent greedily follows the current best-looking direction, it may keep extending a weak continuation. If it explores without discipline, it may waste budget on disconnected trials. We propose TreeSeeker, an inference-time framework for controlled trial-and-error in deep search. TreeSeeker organizes search as branch-and-return search over tree-structured states, where each branch is a tentative direction for a sub-goal. At each round, TreeSearch reads all sub-goal trees, identifies active goals, and uses textual UCB signals of value, uncertainty, and risk to select among exploiting a promising branch, exploring an uncertain alternative, or pruning an unproductive continuation and returning to an earlier branch point. TreeMem supports this control loop by keeping evidence, uncertainty, conflicts, progress, and failure cues attached to the branches that produced them, so trial outcomes can guide later decisions. Experiments on XBench-DeepSearch, BrowseComp, and BrowseComp-ZH show that TreeSeeker consistently outperforms strong open-source baselines, suggesting that explicit branch-and-return control complements stronger reasoning and tool execution.

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

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

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

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Scaling Limits of Bivariate Nearly-Unstable Hawkes Processes and Applications to Rough Volatility

arXiv:2605.03703v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a pair of nearly-unstable Hawkes processes coupled through a one-directional, or triangular, cross-excitation: the first component evolves autonomously and excites the second, but not conversely. Each component is self-exciting through a heavy-tailed memory kernel, and the two kernels are allowed to have different tail indices, so that the limiting components exhibit genuinely different degrees of roughness. As the system approaches criticality, we prove that the suitably rescaled intensity vector converges weakly to the unique solution of a coupled system of stochastic Volterra equations of rough-volatility type. The first limiting component is autonomous, while the second is driven both by its own noise and by an inherited noise transmitted from the first component through an effective cross-kernel. This cross-kernel is the convolution of the two limiting Mittag-Leffler kernels and therefore combines the two memory structures. As a consequence, we obtain a short-time cross-decorrelation law: although the two components are coupled, their functional correlation vanishes at small time scales at an explicit polynomial rate. This time-dependent correlation distinguishes the limit from independent rough processes and from classical bivariate rough models with constant Brownian correlation.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Predicting the Neutrino Mass Ordering Using Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.03745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Determining the neutrino mass ordering remains a central open problem in particle physics. While next-generation long-baseline experiments are expected to resolve this question, current data provide limited sensitivity because the spectral differences between normal and inverted ordering are subtle and entangled with parameter degeneracies. We investigate a machine-learning strategy for mass-ordering determination using a feed-forward neural-network classifier trained on synthetic long-baseline datasets generated with three-flavour oscillation probabilities, matter effects, and statistical fluctuations. We evaluate the classifier against standard $\chi^2$ and $\log\mathcal{L}$ approaches using common discrimination metrics, including receiver-operating-characteristic curves, to quantify sensitivity and to illustrate how operating points can be selected to prioritise purity or efficiency. We find that the neural network achieves performance comparable to conventional fits for the scenarios studied, providing a flexible, independent cross-check of established analyses. The framework can be extended to incorporate systematic uncertainties and to explore joint inference of oscillation parameters, and it may also serve as a pedagogical tool for introducing machine-learning methods in neutrino physics.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Self-Guidance: Enhancing Neural Codecs via Decoder Manifold Alignment

arXiv:2606.12940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural speech codecs based on Vector-Quantized VAEs (VQ-VAEs) are core audio tokenizers for speech LLMs, yet their reconstruction fidelity is bottlenecked by quantization error. Modifying the quantizer or increasing model capacity are common fixes, but they complicate downstream language modeling. Our core idea is to align the decoder's internal feature manifolds when processing both the quantized tokens and their original continuous embeddings, using a lightweight feature-mapping loss. This requires minimal training overhead and no inference-time changes. Applied to XCodec2, self-guidance improves all reconstruction metrics, achieving state-of-the-art low-bitrate performance. Notably, it enables a 4x codebook reduction without fidelity loss, which downstream TTS experiments show significantly improves LLM-based synthesis by simplifying the token modeling space. Multiple statistical observations and visualizations corroborate the enhanced internal manifold alignment in the decoder. Extensive experiments confirm its generality across various inductive biases. Self-guidance thus establishes an efficient, broadly applicable method for high-fidelity neural audio coding.

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

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

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

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ReFree: Towards Realistic Co-Speech Video Generation via Reward-Free RL and Multilevel Speech Guidance

Speech-driven talking character animation seeks to generate life-like portrait videos that convey natural conversation behavior, aligning facial motion with spoken audio. Although recent advances in video generation have substantially improved realism in video-based animation, achieving both accurate lip articulation and expressive behavior remains challenging. Existing approaches typically trade off precise phoneme-to-lip synchronization against dynamic facial expressions and head motion, yielding animations that are either accurate yet rigid, or expressive but poorly synchronized. We address this challenge by proposing ReFree-S2V, a flow-matching speech-to-portrait animation framework that builds upon a pretrained video generation model to achieve fine-grained speech articulation and high-level expressive cues in speech-driven portrait animation. This model introduces a multi-level speech representation capturing phonetic and prosodic information at both local and global granularities. These representations are selectively injected into transformer blocks via learnable level selectors, enabling both accurate lip synchronization and natural expressive motion. To achieve natural head movements, we further introduce a novel reward-free reinforcement learning scheme into flow-matching training to discourage perceptually implausible motion without relying on handcrafted synchronization metrics or reward models, or the high cost of human preference annotation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReFree-S2V achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods in both quantitative lip-sync accuracy and qualitative human evaluations of naturalness and expressivity.

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

How to Score Experts for One-Shot MoE Expert Pruning: A Unified Formulation and Selection Principle

arXiv:2606.15716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models reduce per-token computation through sparse expert activation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making one-shot expert pruning a practical approach for reducing memory usage. Although effective, existing criteria are largely heuristic, and no single criterion is universally optimal. Thus, establishing a principle for selecting pruning criteria suited to different deployment objectives remains an important yet largely underexplored problem in one-shot expert pruning. To this end, we introduce a unified formulation for one-shot MoE expert pruning organized around three factors: routing frequency, gate weighting, and activation strength. The formulation yields a criteria selection principle: task-agnostic pruning should favor routed-token-averaged, gate-free activation-based criteria, whereas task-specific pruning can benefit from retaining routing-frequency and gate-weight information. Beyond this principle, the formulation also provides a systematic view of existing heuristic criteria and gives rise to two new task-agnostic criteria, Mean Activation Norm (MAN) and Mean Squared Activation Norm (MSAN). Across four representative MoE models and 16 diverse benchmarks, MAN and MSAN are consistently strong in the task-agnostic setting, obtain the top-two average ranks, and improve average performance by up to 8.8 points over the strongest baseline.