Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

EgoPhys: Learning Generalizable Physics Models of Deformable Objects from Egocentric Video

Humans naturally understand object physics through everyday interactions, but faithfully predicting complex deformable dynamics, such as elastic materials and fabrics, remains a major challenge for computer vision and robotics. We present EgoPhys, a framework that constructs deformable physical digital twins from egocentric RGB-only video using generalizable priors. EgoPhys overcomes the limitations of existing methods to enable controllable deformable digital twin generation from egocentric videos by distilling per-object inverse-physics solutions into a compact codebook, enabling prediction of dense spring stiffness fields for unseen objects without per-spring test-time optimization. Trained with generalizable priors from diverse egocentric interactions, EgoPhys outperforms baselines in reconstruction, future prediction, and zero-shot generalization. To support training and evaluation, we curate an egocentric interaction dataset covering diverse deformable objects, scenes, and manipulation styles. We deploy EgoPhys on a real xArm6 robot, demonstrating that a digital twin initialized from a single egocentric human play video can serve as an internal world representation to aid in deformable-object planning, highlighting egocentric RGB observations as a scalable path toward real-to-sim pipelines.

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

Where, What, Why, and Importance: Structured Defect Grounding for Text-to-Image Feedback

Despite generating increasingly photorealistic images, text-to-image (T2I) models still exhibit localized, subtle, and structurally complex failures. Diagnosing these failures requires instance-level feedback that answers where a defect occurs, what type it is, why it is defective, and its importance to overall image quality. While recent dense-feedback methods move beyond scalar supervision, their heatmap-centric representations still formulate diagnosis as pixel-field regression, making it difficult to localize variable-cardinality defects and bind semantic reasons to individual failures. To address this representation bottleneck, we propose Structured Defect Grounding (SDG), which casts T2I diagnosis as structured set prediction by modeling each defect as a (location, type, reason, importance) tuple. To make this formulation trainable and measurable, we introduce SDG-30K, a 30K-image dataset with box-grounded annotations across four modern T2I generators, together with a dedicated evaluation protocol, SDG-Eval. Building on this structured representation, we further present a diagnosis-to-alignment framework in which a Vision-Language Model (VLM) serves as the SDG detector, and BoxFlow-GRPO converts predicted defect sets into box-derived, importance-weighted spatial rewards for diffusion model alignment. Extensive experiments show that our SDG detector outperforms leading proprietary VLMs on structured defect grounding, while SDG-guided rewards consistently improve T2I alignment and support localized image refinement. These results establish SDG as a unified, instance-level interface for diagnosing, evaluating, and enhancing modern generative models.

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

Beyond Runtime Enforcement: Shield Synthesis as Defensibility Analysis for Adversarial Networks

arXiv:2606.13621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shielded reinforcement learning is typically presented as a runtime safety mechanism that compiles temporal-logic specifications into automata restricting an agent's actions. We argue this is the wrong product. The same automata-theoretic machinery – specification compilation, product game construction, attractor computation, and winning-region extraction – is better read as a design-time analytical instrument whose outputs are structural insights about a system rather than runtime constraints on a deployed agent. We instantiate this through a constrained two-player safety game for network defense. The two specifications are enforced asymmetrically: the defender specification defines the unsafe region of the game, whereas the attacker specification restricts the adversary's legal actions during attractor computation. Solving the game yields a defensibility verdict – a formal certificate that a topology-specification pair is or is not defensible – with the associated winning region and shield. Beyond the binary verdict, we derive topology-level metrics from the attractor structure and combine them with post-convergence behavior from shield-constrained adversarial multi-agent reinforcement learning. Together these form a defensibility fingerprint capturing both a network's formal safety properties and its operational behavior under adaptive play. A what-if analysis shows that formal defensibility and operational effectiveness capture distinct aspects of security: small architectural changes can produce large shifts in operational outcomes while leaving formal safety margins nearly unchanged. Shield synthesis is thus most valuable not as a deployment mechanism for safe agents, but as a framework for answering architectural questions about whether, where, and how a system can be defended. The defensibility verdict is the output, not the safe policy.

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

When is Your LLM Steerable?

Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to control language models' behavior at inference time, but whether it succeeds or fails heavily depends on the prompt, concept, model, and steering configuration. Finding the regime and boundaries of successful steering typically requires expensive grid searches and post-hoc evaluation of full autoregressive rollouts. In this work, we investigate whether steerability can be predicted from the model's internal states at the beginning of the generation process, e.g., after generating the first few tokens, and how to leverage such a predictor to improve steering success rate. To this end, we first introduce ASTEER, a testbed including 1.4M steered generations, spanning 150 concepts with each steering success/failure labeled. Leveraging this testbed, we analyze the model's early decoding dynamics by extracting features that compare hidden states before and after steering across layers and initial decoding steps. These features help us understand how steering's effects propagate along layers and token positions, which provide key information for steerability prediction. We then train a Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDT) classifier on these features to predict whether an intervention will under-steer, succeed, or over-steer without requiring full rollout. Our predictor achieves around 0.7 macro-F1 score on unseen concepts, demonstrating that early hidden states encode substantial, structured information about eventual steering efficacy. We further leverage this steerability predictor as guidance for steering strength searching, achieving near-optimal performance with a small fraction of decoding cost.

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

GASE: Gaussian Splatting-Based Automated System for Reconstructing Embodied-Simulation Environments

Training embodied agents in the real world requires skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulation environments offer a compelling alternative by enabling large-scale, cost-effective data augmentation. Consequently, rapidly constructing high-fidelity simulation scenes with a minimal sim-to-real gap has become a critical objective in robot learning. While reconstruction-based methods provide superior visual quality, current workflows are hindered by inefficient data acquisition and subpar foreground object extraction. We thus propose GASE, a highly automated system for simulation scene construction. GASE leverages multi-view video streams from panoramic camera arrays to enable rapid environment scanning. To ensure high-quality asset generation, our pipeline introduces a camera-pose-based strategy that robustly extracts objects across frames in the 2D domain, followed by high-fidelity scene inpainting. Foreground objects and the static background are then reconstructed independently and seamlessly imported into physics simulators for policy training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GASE outperforms existing 3D Gaussian-based methods in segmentation accuracy by over 10\% while achieving state-of-the-art inpainting quality. Furthermore, real-robot deployments across manipulation and navigation tasks maintains a performance gap of less than 10\% compared to policies trained purely on real-world data. These results confirm that GASE provides an efficient and highly effective solution for bridging the sim-to-real gap. Code will be released.

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

An XAI View on Explainable ASP: Methods, Systems, and Perspectives

arXiv:2601.14764v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular declarative reasoning and problem solving approach in symbolic AI. Its rule-based formalism makes it inherently attractive for explainable and interpretive reasoning, which is gaining importance with the surge of Explainable AI (XAI). A number of explanation approaches and tools for ASP have been developed, which often tackle specific explanatory settings and may not cover all scenarios that ASP users encounter. In this survey, we provide, guided by an XAI perspective, an overview of types of ASP explanations in connection with user questions for explanation, and describe their coverage by current theory and tools. Furthermore, we pinpoint gaps in existing ASP explanations approaches and identify research directions for future work.

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

CogniFold: Always-On Proactive Memory via Cognitive Folding

Existing agent memory remains predominantly reactive and retrieval-based, lacking the capacity to autonomously organize experience into persistent cognitive structure. Toward genuinely autonomous agents, we introduce CogniFold, a brain-inspired "always-on" agent memory designed for the next generation of proactive assistants. CogniFold continuously folds fragmented event streams into self-emerging cognitive structures, bootstrapping progressively higher-level cognition from incoming events and accumulated knowledge. We ground this by extending Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory from two layers (hippocampus, neocortex) to three, adding a prefrontal intent layer. Emulating the prefrontal cortex as the locus of intentional control and decision-making, CogniFold achieves this through graph-topology self-organization: cognitive structures proactively assemble under the stream, merge when semantically similar, decay when stale, relink through associative recall, and surface intents when concept-cluster density crosses a threshold. We evaluate structural formation using CogEval-Bench, demonstrating that CogniFold uniquely produces memory structures that match cognitive expectations and concept emergence. Furthermore, across eight downstream benchmarks – two probing long-term conversational memory (LoCoMo, LongMemEval) and six spanning other cognitive domains – we validate that CogniFold simultaneously performs robustly on conventional memory tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/OpenNorve/CogniFold.

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

TopoCap: Learning Topology-Agnostic Motion Priors for Monocular Video-to-Animation

The explosion of generative 3D assets has created a massive demand for animation, yet current motion capture methods remain brittle, restricted to species-specific templates (e.g., SMPL) or requiring labor-intensive manual rigging. We introduce TopoCap, the first unified framework capable of extracting motion from monocular video and retargeting it onto characters with arbitrary, unseen skeletal topologies, i.e., from bipeds to hexapods and inanimate objects, without test-time optimization. Our key insight is that while skeletal structures are combinatorial and discrete, the underlying physics of motion occupy a continuous, low-dimensional manifold. We materialize this insight via a two-stage generative pipeline. First, we learn a Universal Motion Manifold using a Graph CVAE that compresses heterogeneous kinematic chains into a shared, fixed-length latent code. By explicitly conditioning the decoder on a structural embedding of the target rig, we disentangle motion dynamics from skeletal topology. Second, we treat video-to-animation as a conditional flow matching problem, predicting these topology-agnostic codes from visual features. To learn this generalized prior, we introduce Mobjaverse, a massive-scale dataset curated from Objaverse-XL. Comprising over 5,000 unique skeletal topologies and 2 million frames, it exceeds the structural diversity of existing datasets by two orders of magnitude. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \MethodMotion outperforms specialist models on human and quadruped benchmarks while enabling zero-shot retargeting for the long tail of 3D creatures. Dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/duckduckplz/Mobjaverse.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Benchmarking Large Language Models for Safety Data Extraction

Accurate extraction of structured information from Safety Data Sheets (SDS) remains challenging in industrial safety due to heterogeneous document formats and the limitations of traditional rule-based methods. This study benchmarks state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated SDS data extraction, comparing text-based and multimodal processing pipelines. We systematically evaluate four models: Gemini 1.5 Pro, GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Llama 3.1-70B, across three prompting strategies: zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought. The evaluation framework assessed accuracy, latency, and cost across more than 50,000 extracted data fields. Results show that text-based extraction consistently outperforms multimodal processing across all metrics. Gemini 1.5 Pro combined with a Chain-of-Thought prompt achieved the highest accuracy (84%), outperforming GPT-4o (81%) and Claude 3.7 Sonnet (79%). However, no model surpassed the 90% accuracy threshold commonly required for reliable real-world deployment. These findings indicate that general-purpose LLMs are not yet robust enough for unsupervised industrial use, though performance suggests strong potential with task-specific fine-tuning. Future research should focus on domain-adapted training, model calibration, and the integration of Human-in-the-Loop verification to ensure safety-critical reliability.

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

TERMS-Bench: Diagnosing LLM Negotiation Agents Beyond Deal Rate

arXiv:2605.13909v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Negotiation is a central mechanism of economic exchange, shaping markets, procurement, labor agreements, and resource allocation. It is also a canonical testbed for agentic language models, requiring multi-turn interaction under hidden preferences, strategic communication, and binding constraints. These properties make negotiation hard to evaluate: unlike math or code, it has no intrinsic verifier. Existing LLM negotiation evaluations rely on LLM-vs.-LLM interaction or aggregate outcomes such as deal rate, leaving failures opaque. We introduce Terms-Bench, short for Testbed for Economic Reasoning in Multi-turn Strategy, a Bayesian-game framework that makes the environment itself the verifier by specifying the counterpart's latent type, policy, and payoff structure. We instantiate it in bilateral price negotiation, where the counterpart's private state and simulator policy are hidden from the agent but observable to the evaluator. This turns the counterpart from a black-box opponent into a diagnostic instrument, enabling agent-attributable failure analysis and oracle-reference optimality gaps. Evaluating 13 LLM agents spanning frontier systems from major providers, Terms-Bench turns negotiation evaluation from aggregate ranking into actionable diagnosis: where agents fail, why they fail, and what to strengthen. Empirically, frontier models saturate deal rate yet diverge in surplus extraction, cue use, belief calibration, and compliance, revealing agent-specific bargaining bottlenecks masked by prior benchmarks.

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

Adjoint Method versus Physics-Informed Neural Networks in PDE-Constrained Inverse Problems

arXiv:2606.12337v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) are central to computational mechanics and are commonly solved by adjoint-based optimization, while physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a flexible alternative. Their relative performance remains difficult to assess because the two approaches are often compared under different formulations, parameterizations, optimizers, and regularization choices. We present a fair comparison of adjoint optimization and PINNs for PDE-constrained inverse problems. From a common abstract formulation, we instantiate both methods on identical domains, governing equations, observation models, and regularization terms, while matching the optimizer, unknown parameterization, and arithmetic precision wherever applicable. The benchmarks include unsteady Burgers, noisy Darcy permeability inversion, three-dimensional Allen–Cahn reaction identification, and unsteady Navier–Stokes viscosity identification. The results show that the representation of the unknown largely determines the preferred method: grid-based fields favor the discrete adjoint, whereas neural representations are native to PINNs and relevant for closure and constitutive modeling. For time-dependent problems, adjoint inversion can be dominated by trajectory storage and differentiation, while PINNs provide satisfactory reconstructions at lower cost. A PINN-warm-started adjoint strategy then recovers adjoint-level accuracy at substantially reduced cost.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

On the Optimal Reasoning Length for RL-Trained Language Models

Reinforcement learning substantially improves reasoning in large language models, but it also tends to lengthen chain-of-thought outputs and increase computational cost. Although length-control methods have been proposed, the length-accuracy relationship they induce remains unclear. We train policies with several length-control methods on multiple base models in a controlled setup and find that, across both mathematical reasoning and code generation, accuracy is non-monotonic in output length, peaking at an intermediate value. Mode accuracy, however, continues to improve with length even in settings where sample accuracy plateaus or declines, indicating that the non-monotonic length-accuracy relationship is driven by dispersion around an increasingly correct center.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Q-DICE: Quantum Distributed Interconnect Compiler and Emulator

arXiv:2606.11340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As distributed quantum computing (DQC) offers a leading path towards scalable quantum computation, the ability to benchmark distributed algorithms under realistic conditions becomes critical for system co-design. However, without access to physical systems, researchers lack tools to evaluate distribution protocols. We introduce Q-DICE (Quantum Distributed Interconnect Compiler and Emulator), a hardware-aware emulation environment for benchmarking distributed quantum circuits on classical simulators and on NISQ-era monolithic hardware. This work provides three core contributions: (1) a programmatic scheme to construct distributed QPU backends, utilizing two novel techniques - QPU slicing and stitching - to facilitate distributed circuit mapping, (2) a methodology for modeling nonlocal link noise using physically motivated Kraus operators and stochastic error channels, and (3) a boundary-aware circuit mapping algorithm enforcing distributed QPU topology constraints during transpilation. Together, these components constitute a distribution-aware compiler and noise-modeling engine that faithfully enforces the physical limitations of distributed quantum hardware within existing execution environments. We validate Q-DICE against a multitude of experimentally demonstrated quantum circuits, including a distributed Grover's search on optically linked trapped-ion hardware, achieving a worst-case fidelity deviation of 4% between simulated and experimental results. These findings demonstrate Q-DICE's capacity to accurately reproduce real distributed quantum system behavior across platforms, streamlining experimentation with distributed quantum algorithms and architectures.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Fisher Width: A Geometric Measure of Complexity on Statistical Manifolds

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gaussian width is a central geometric complexity measure in high-dimensional probability, compressed sensing, convex optimization, and learning theory. It quantifies the average extent of a set along random directions, thereby capturing the effective dimension of constraint sets, hypothesis classes, and descent cones. However, this notion is intrinsically Euclidean. Statistical models instead carry a natural Riemannian geometry induced by the Fisher information metric, where directions are scaled according to statistical distinguishability rather than ambient Euclidean length. We introduce Fisher width, a Fisher-geometric analogue of Gaussian width for statistical manifolds. At a parameter point $\theta$, Fisher width replaces the Euclidean identity by the local metric tensor $G(\theta)^{1/2}$, measuring the Gaussian width of the Fisher-rescaled set. This makes the resulting quantity sensitive to local statistical curvature and invariant under smooth reparameterizations. We develop the basic theory of Fisher width, showing that it retains key structural features of Gaussian width, including concentration, metric perturbation stability, and spectral comparison bounds with the Euclidean baseline, while also capturing anisotropic geometric effects invisible to Euclidean measures. As an application, we prove a generalization bound for Fisher-Lipschitz hypothesis classes and propose computable estimators, which we evaluate empirically on MNIST across three model classes. Fisher width is to statistical manifolds what Gaussian width is to Euclidean convex bodies. This work lays the foundation for studying complexity and learning on curved statistical manifolds.

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

VinQA: Visual Elements Interleaved Long-form Answer Generation for Real-World Multimodal Document QA

Real-world documents combine text with tables, charts, photographs, and diagrams arranged in diverse layouts, yet existing research on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for document QA predominantly produces text-only responses, underutilizing these visual elements. We introduce VinQA, a dataset for long-form answer generation where cited visual elements are explicitly interleaved with their supporting text and grounded in relevant document pages. To support this task, we study two encoding methods for feeding raw document page images into an MLLM, along with their visual-element citation mechanisms: (1) Page Encoding, which directly encodes full-page images with bounding boxes of visual elements and treats these boxed regions as citable units; and (2) Modality Encoding, which parses each page to extract text and crop visual elements, encodes them separately, and uses these cropped elements as citable units. In our experiments, we propose M-GroSE, a multimodal evaluation framework extending GroUSE to assess answers along four dimensions: completeness, answer relevancy, faithfulness, and unanswerability. We additionally report Visual Source F1 to directly measure visual citation accuracy. Although proprietary frontier models still achieve the best overall scores on the VinQA test split, fine-tuning open Qwen2.5-VL models on the training split substantially improves their performance and narrows this gap. Modality Encoding is initially more robust for complex documents with long text, many visual elements, and diverse citation requirements. After training on VinQA, however, Page Encoding reaches a comparable level, competing effectively even without the explicit parsing used in Modality Encoding. Finally, Visual G-Eval, an MLLM-based judge, confirms that fine-tuned models insert visual elements at semantically appropriate positions with faithful supporting text.

16.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-27

Sequential chemo-immunotherapy followed by standard versus reduced thoracic radiotherapy for older and/or frail stage III non-small-cell lung cancer: A randomized open-label cohort trial

Authors:

by Wei-Xiang Qi, Shuyan Li, Mengdi Wang, Huan Li, Feifei Xu, Lei Yao, Biao Yu, Linlin Chen, Gang Cai, Cheng Xu, Xianwen Sun, Zhiyao Bao, Jiayi Chen, Yi Xiang, Shengguang Zhao Background The appropriateness of concurrent chemoradiotherapy (cCRT) for older or clinically vulnerable stage III unresectable non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients remains contentious. Furthermore, the survival implications of de-escalating thoracic radiotherapy (RT) intensity in this population have not been conclusively elucidated. Methods and findings We conducted a phase II randomized, open-label, two-cohort (non-comparative) trial at a tertiary hospital in China (NCT05557552). Between September 30, 2022 and April 30, 2024, we enrolled 56 older and/or frail patients with stage III NSCLC who were ineligible for cCRT. The primary endpoint was the 1-year progression-free survival (PFS) rate estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method. Secondary endpoints included objective response rate (ORR), overall survival (OS), and safety. In the intention-to-treat (ITT) set, which included all 56 randomized patients who received at least one dose of study treatment, the 1-year PFS was 84.3% (95% confidence interval [CI] [70.3%, 98.3%]) in the standard RT group and 70.7% (95% CI [54.3%, 87.1%]) in the reduced RT group. In the per-protocol set (53 patients), the 1-year PFS was 82.9% (95% CI [68.9%, 98.8%]) in the standard RT group and 73.4% (95% CI [58.3%, 92.4%]), with a median follow-up of 24 months. Among 56 patients in the safety analysis set, 71.4% of patients experienced grade 3/4 adverse events (AEs) in the standard RT group and 53.6% in the reduced RT group. One patient (3.6%) in the reduced RT and three patients (10.7%) in the standardized RT experienced grade 5 AEs. The main limitations are the non-comparative design, small sample size, and lack of power to establish non-inferiority or superiority. Conclusion The current study suggested that reduced RT combined with sequential chemo-immunotherapy might be feasible for older/frail patients intolerant to cCRT, showing numerically similar survival outcomes. These exploratory findings warrant confirmation in larger, adequately powered randomized trials. Trial registration The trial had been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov on Sep 30, 2022.ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05557552

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Morpho-FM: spatial molecular reconstruction from routine H&E histology using transcriptomic foundation-model priors

Routine haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) histology captures tissue architecture at clinical scale, but lacks a direct molecular readout of the transcriptional programmes that organise tumour epithelium, stroma, vasculature and immune compartments. Spatial transcriptomics provides this context, yet cost, workflow complexity and sparse sampling limit routine use. Most existing histology-to-expression models are trained de novo on small paired cohorts and therefore remain weakly constrained when extrapolating from sparse measurements to dense, tissue-wide molecular maps. Here we introduce Morpho-FM, a weakly supervised framework that predicts spatial gene expression from routine H&E whole-slide images by conditioning a pretrained single-cell transcriptomic foundation-model prior on local histological neighbourhoods. A lightweight morphology-to-transcriptome adapter maps cached whole-slide histology features into a transcriptomic decoder, enabling prediction at measured locations, dense full-section reconstruction, and re-aggregation to the original measurement support. Across harmonized prostate cancer benchmarks, Morpho-FM achieved the strongest overall performance among five representative methods, reaching mean per-gene Pearson correlations of 0.286 in rotating single-slide evaluation and 0.298 in multi-slide held-out validation. The framework reproduced this advantage across kidney cancer sections, achieved a mean correlation of 0.210 across 56 directed single-slide evaluations and retained measurable predictive signal after external transfer to clear-cell renal cell carcinoma sections. Controlled ablation analyses identified pretrained transcriptomic initialization as a reproducible source of performance gain exceeding that attributable to changes in the histology feature backbone. Beyond predictive accuracy benchmarks, Morpho-FM recovered ERBB2-enriched tumour compartments, boundary-associated molecular gradients, and annotation-aligned tissue domains across Xenium and HER2ST breast cancer datasets. Together, these results support transcriptomic foundation-model priors as an effective constraint for morphology-conditioned molecular decoding and demonstrate the potential of Morpho-FM to extend spatial transcriptomic insight across routine pathology sections.

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

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

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

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

Probabilistic Contrastive Pretraining for Multi-task ADME Property Prediction

arXiv:2606.11508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties is critical to drug discovery, but remains challenging because ADME endpoints are noisy, interdependent, and often data-limited. We propose a molecular graph-transformer pretraining framework that combines chemistry-specific self-supervision with contrastive mutual information machine learning (cMIM). Our method encodes molecular graphs into latent variables, reconstructs SMILES strings from the graph-derived latent codes, and augments the contrastive objective with domain-specific self-supervised chemistry tasks. Rather than treating these tasks as auxiliary regularizers with separately tuned loss weights, we formulate reconstruction, contrastive discrimination, and chemistry-specific supervision as unit-weighted log-probability factors in a single probabilistic latent-variable objective. For fine-tuning, we propose a multi-task GNN readout architecture with task-specific multilayer perceptron heads, preserving shared representation learning while mitigating negative transfer and improving the modeling of heterogeneous, nonlinear task relationships. Across Biogen, ExpansionRX, and ChEMBL-MT, the resulting Contrastive KERMT pretraining improves over the KERMT baseline by 7.6%, 9.9%, and 9.5% respectively (averaged over significantly-improved endpoints). Adding ADME-adjacent molecules to the pretraining corpus further improves transfer, and the contrastive component sharpens chemically meaningful latent neighborhoods.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Measurement-Calibrated Multi-Camera Fusion for Vision-Based Indoor Localization

Indoor vision-based localization systems are affected by detection noise, occlusions, and limited camera coverage, leading to uncertainty at multiple stages of the pipeline. While multi-camera data fusion is widely used to mitigate these issues, it is typically treated as a black-box component and evaluated solely end-to-end, obscuring its mechanistic contributions. To address this gap, this work investigates whether explicitly characterizing single-camera localization errors can be leveraged to calibrate and optimize multi-camera data fusion. We introduce a measurement-calibrated fusion approach that integrates component-wise error quantification, specifically isolating homography calibration, human detection, and motion tracking. A component-wise evaluation is conducted to quantify error contributions from homography calibration, human detection, and motion tracking. Experimental results show that data fusion improves localization accuracy compared to single-camera baselines. While measurement-calibrated fusion provides only limited improvement in absolute accuracy over standard fusion, it substantially reduces trajectory variance and improves motion smoothness, which are critical for applications requiring stable and continuous motion estimates. These results highlight the value of explicit error characterization when designing data fusion strategies for vision-based indoor positioning systems.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Counterfactual Explanations for Deep Two-Sample Testing

arXiv:2606.04009v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Two-sample testing is a fundamental tool for detecting distributional differences across scientific domains, but classical tests (including kernel-based tests) can be ineffective on high-dimensional structured data such as images. Recent deep two-sample tests improve sensitivity in these settings by learning informative representations, yet they provide limited insight into which data features drive rejection of the null hypothesis $H_0$. To address this issue, we propose a counterfactual explanation framework for deep two-sample testing that generates sample-level edits moving observations from a source group toward a target group while explicitly reducing the discrepancy measured by the test. Our method combines a diffusion autoencoder with a pretrained deep two-sample test model and optimizes a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) objective in the test model's representation space to produce plausible counterfactuals. We quantify distribution-level effects through changes in the test statistic and the resulting two-sample p-values. We evaluate the method on synthetic 2D shape datasets and two MRI cohorts. Across both settings, the counterfactual transformations consistently increase p-values relative to the original samples, indicating that the edited source set becomes statistically closer to the target distribution under the test. We measure minimality using LPIPS to ensure the counterfactuals remain close to the original samples. The resulting edits provide interpretable evidence of the features associated with the detected group differences. On MRI, the localized changes are consistent with known anatomical differences between cohorts.

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

NRITYAM: Language Models Meet Art and Heritage of Dance

Language models have become essential tools in shaping modern workflows. However, their global effectiveness hinges on a nuanced understanding of local socio-cultural contexts. To address this gap, we present NRITYAM, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the cultural comprehension capabilities of language models in the context of global dance traditions. NRITYAM comprises 9,260 carefully curated question-answer pairs spanning 12 languages, making it the largest dataset dedicated to evaluating cultural knowledge in dance. The dataset has been developed from the ground up through close collaboration with native dance artists and native speakers of the languages, who authored and validated culturally relevant questions specific to their regions. We evaluate a broad set of models, including large language models, small language models, multimodal large language models, and small multimodal language models. As a multilingual and multicultural benchmark, NRITYAM sets a new standard for evaluating the ability of AI systems to understand and reason about traditional performing arts. Detailed dataset samples are available at~\url{https://github.com/niladrighosh03/NRITYAM}.

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

Size Doesn't Matter: Cosine-Scored Sparse Autoencoders

arXiv:2606.15054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) detect features via inner product, so a feature's activation scales with both its directional alignment and the input's norm. Under BatchTopK, high-norm tokens inflate all pre-activations simultaneously, claiming dictionary slots regardless of content alignment. This matters because sublayer normalization has already discarded the magnitude the score measures, so the encoder detects a quantity the model does not read. We replace the score with a learned blend of cosine similarity and input magnitude, letting the optimizer choose how much norm to use; a per-feature extension lets each feature decide independently. In both regimes, training is free to recover inner product but never does, with no feature ever choosing more than half-magnitude dependence. At matched reconstruction, the cosine encoder learns features that align with human-recognizable concepts far more often than standard, filling dictionary slots that inner product wastes on norm detectors. Loss reweighting that equalizes gradients barely closes the gap, confirming forward-pass score geometry as the lever. The advantage is not universal across tasks or depths, but we believe cosine scoring should be the default for dictionary learning on normalized representations.

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

Dr-DCI: Scaling Direct Corpus Interaction via Dynamic Workspace Expansion

Agentic search over large corpora relies on retriever-mediated interfaces (e.g., BM25 or ColBERT) for scalable candidate discovery. While effective at ranking relevant documents, these interfaces expose evidence only as ranked results or bounded document views, limiting agents' ability to reorganize material and verify constraints across documents. Direct Corpus Interaction (DCI) addresses this limitation by exposing shell-executable corpus operations for flexible search, filtering, comparison, and verification. However, full-corpus terminal commands become slow and unstable as the corpus grows, degrading performance and efficiency. We introduce DR-DCI, a retriever-steered DCI framework that treats retrieval as an agent-callable action for expanding a local workspace. Rather than operating directly over the full corpus, the agent dynamically pulls relevant documents into an evolving workspace and conducts DCI operations within it. This design combines retriever-level recall with DCI-style precision: retrieval keeps exploration scalable, while DCI preserves the local operations needed for effective evidence resolution. Experiments show that DR-DCI is both effective and efficient across scales. On Browsecomp-Plus, DR-DCI reaches 71.2\% accuracy, improving over raw DCI and ablated variants by up to 8.3 points while reducing tool usage, wall time, and estimated cost. With workspace-preserving context reset, accuracy further improves to 73.3\%. In corpus-scaling experiments, DR-DCI remains effective from 100K to 10M documents, whereas raw DCI becomes unstable and BM25 performs substantially worse. DR-DCI also scales to a 20M-scale file-per-document Wiki-18 QA setting, achieving an average score of 63.0 across six benchmarks and outperforming retrieval-based and trained search-agent baselines. Ablation analysis further shows that ranked previews and inter-document DCI are key to performance.

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

CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment

Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHILLGuard: a dedicated Chinese LLM content safety guardrail. To address the critical scarcity of high-quality annotated Chinese safety data, we propose a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline: we expand multi-source corpus via retrieval-augmented generation, generate implicit harmful samples through prompt engineering rewriting, and refine high-quality data via multi-model voting-based label calibration. Based on this, we build CHILLGuardTrain, a large-scale training set with 405,007 samples, and CHILLGuardTest, a rigorously curated annotated test set with 51,745 samples. We then train CHILLGuard on CHILLGuardTrain under a generator-classifier collaborative framework via Model-aware Direct Preference Optimization. Extensive experiments under multiple settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CHILLGuard, e.g., a 15.92% improvement of F1 score over Qwen3Guard-8B-Strict on our benchmark. We will release our resources at https://github.com/cswbyu/CHILLGuard.