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.LG) 2026-06-17

Geometrical fairness in graph neural networks

arXiv:2606.17684v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based learning methods have become increasingly prominent due to their strong performance across diverse applications. Among these, recent frameworks grounded in diffusion processes provide a unifying perspective that extends traditional graph neural network formulations while addressing limitations of standard message-passing mechanisms. Despite these advances, concerns remain regarding the fairness of such models, as they may propagate or amplify biases present in the data. In this work, we introduce a fairness-aware adaptation of graph-based diffusion by modifying the underlying Laplacian operator. Our approach incorporates multiple complementary transformations, including subspace projections, spectral adjustments, and frequency-based filtering, to mitigate bias-related components. Leveraging the intrinsic smoothing properties of graph diffusion, we provide a principled analysis of the resulting behavior and establish theoretical insights into fairness properties. We evaluate the proposed framework on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that it achieves competitive performance while improving fairness metrics with limited additional computational cost.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Daily briefing: Sperm whales have different dialects

Authors:

Whales in different areas of the Mediterranean use varying patterns of clicks and pauses. Plus, a technique to make protein samples one billion times bigger and the science of grief. Whales in different areas of the Mediterranean use varying patterns of clicks and pauses. Plus, a technique to make protein samples one billion times bigger and the science of grief.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

How Task Structure Limits Multi-Agent Success: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

arXiv:2606.13733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) were expected to overcome the limitation of single-agent systems (SAS) through collaboration. However, under typicality conditions on the task's constraint graph and bounded inter-agent communication, we prove that the success probability of a MAS is closely tied to the connectivity of task constraints, where each agent has limited information-processing capacity. Specifically, the success probability decays exponentially with an information bottleneck that emerges from partitioning the task's constraint graph among agents. We define this quantity as the minimum cut cost $C_{\min}$ of the potential constraint graph of each task. This information-theoretic bound applies to both open systems with external feedback and closed systems without. We validate our theory on both synthetic experiments and real-world empirical data from SWE-bench submissions. From our framework, effective MAS design should incorporate task-inherent constraints alongside engineering optimization, and when $\Cmin$ is high, practitioners should restructure tasks rather than simply scaling agents or communication.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Asymptotically Optimal Circuit Depth for Diagonal Unitary Synthesis and Compilation on Two-Dimensional Grids

arXiv:2606.17589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diagonal unitaries are a fundamental but resource-intensive class of quantum operations, arising as the phase separators of QAOA and the time-evolution blocks of Hamiltonian simulation. Under all-to-all connectivity their optimal depth is established, but on nearest-neighbor hardware general-purpose compilers fall back on heuristic search, which yields no analyzable cost bound and becomes intractable at the very sizes where depth is the bottleneck. We address synthesis and compilation jointly. On the synthesis side, we develop a Gray-Path Framework (GPF) that realizes any $n$-qubit diagonal unitary in asymptotically optimal $R_z$ and CNOT depth $O(2^n/n)$ without ancillas. Our main result is that compiling GPF onto a two-dimensional nearest-neighbor grid preserves this optimality: routing adds depth $\Theta(2^n/n)$ and gate count $\Theta(2^n)$. Because GPF fixes its entire interaction structure in advance, routing reduces to scheduling a known sequence, with no heuristic search. We give the construction both with and without ancillas: the ancilla-free, cost-optimized layout is a two-row grid, and a $2k$-row layout introduces a space–time tradeoff that cuts depth by $1/k$ while remaining asymptotically optimal for the enlarged register; both are deterministic and analyzed in closed form. The same complexity is also attained on a linear nearest-neighbor chain, so the preservation is topology-independent, holding on any architecture that contains such a chain. All routing bounds are closed-form, giving the concrete resource estimates that heuristic compilers cannot provide at scale.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Reinforcement Learning for Accelerated Aerodynamic Shape Optimisation

arXiv:2507.17786v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) based adaptive optimization algorithm for aerodynamic shape optimization focused on dimensionality reduction. The form in which RL is applied here is that of a surrogate-based, actor-critic policy evaluation MCMC approach allowing for temporal 'freezing' of some of the parameters to be optimized. The goals are to minimize computational effort, and to use the observed optimization results for interpretation of the discovered extrema in terms of their role in achieving the desired flow-field. By a sequence of local optimized parameter changes around intermediate CFD simulations acting as ground truth, it is possible to speed up the global optimization if (a) the local neighbourhoods of the parameters in which the changed parameters must reside are sufficiently large to compete with the grid-sized steps and its large number of simulations, and (b) the estimates of the rewards and costs on these neighbourhoods necessary for a good step-wise parameter adaption are sufficiently accurate. We give an example of a simple fluid-dynamical problem on which the method allows interpretation in the sense of a feature importance scoring.

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

Active interference suppression in frequency-division-multiplexed quantum gates via off-resonant microwave tones

arXiv:2601.14547v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasing number of control lines connecting quantum processors to external electronics constitutes a major bottleneck in the realization of large-scale quantum computers. Frequency-division multiplexing is expected to enable control of multiple qubits through a single microwave cable; however, interference from off-resonant microwave tones hinders precise qubit control. Here, we propose an active interference suppression method for frequency-division-multiplexed simultaneous gates on microwave-controlled qubits. We demonstrate that the deliberate incorporation of off-resonant microwave tones improves single-qubit gate fidelity. In particular, the gate infidelity scales inversely with the square of the number of microwave tones when off-resonant orthogonal or quasi-orthogonal tones are incorporated. Furthermore, we show that fast oscillations, neglected under the rotating wave approximation, degrade the gate fidelity, and that this degradation can be mitigated through optimized frequency allocation. The proposed approach is simple and effective for improving the performance of frequency-division-multiplexed quantum gates.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Expanding the GUSome: Structure-guided identification and characterization of gut microbial β-glucuronidases

The gut microbiome-encoded {beta}-glucuronidase (GUS) enzymes have a significant effect on human physiology through their deglucuronidation activity on endogenous and exogenous glucuronides. GUS activity also significantly influences the pharmacokinetics, efficacy and toxicity of various drugs including chemotherapeutic drugs. Given their crucial role in drug metabolism, GUS enzymes have emerged as promising targets for therapeutic intervention. Here, we have identified and characterized 79 unique GUS enzymes through a structure-guided approach. Structural modelling of these GUS enzymes revealed a conserved core and active-site residues with significant variations in the number and nature of the C-terminal domains. A new classification system based on the number and type of additional C-terminal domains is presented for the GUS proteins. Further, GUS enzymes have been categorized into different loop categories linked to their substrate preferences. The relationship between domain architecture and loop-type is explored by sequence similarity network analysis. We could successfully express, purify and validate GUS processing capability of a panel of identified GUS proteins. The nature of oligomer organization has been deciphered by SEC and DLS studies. Further, we have identified additional GUS enzymes capable of processing SN-38G, glucuronidated form of anticancer drug, irinotecan. These newly identified GUS enzymes will offer valuable insights into gut microbial GUS diversity and their role in understanding the population-specific drug-induced adverse effects on human health.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Factors associated with the uptake of intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine: The experiences of postpartum women attending child welfare clinics in three rural districts in the Western Region of Ghana.

Background Intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (IPTp-SP) is a key preventive strategy. However, optimal uptake remains inconsistent despite high antenatal care (ANC) attendance. This study assessed factors associated with IPTp-SP uptake and explored the experiences of postpartum women in rural Ghana. Methods A mixed-method study was conducted among 1,155 postpartum women attending child welfare clinics in Jomoro, Prestea-Huni Valley and Ellembelle districts of the Western Region of Ghana. Quantitative data were collected using structured questionnaires and analysed using descriptive statistics and chi-square tests. Qualitative data from in-depth interviews and focus group discussions were analysed thematically to explore womens experiences and perceptions. Results Overall, 73.5% (812/1105) of respondents received at least three doses of SP during pregnancy, in line with WHO recommendations. The most common number of doses received was three doses (31.5%, 348/1105), followed by four doses (26.4%, 292/1105), while a smaller proportion (8.1%, 90/1105) received only one dose. Knowledge of malaria in pregnancy was generally high: 92.7% (1027/1155) of respondents correctly identified its mode of transmission, while 75.1% (830/1155) and 83.5% (923/1155) were aware of the effects of malaria on pregnancy and the foetus, respectively. Uptake was not significantly associated with socio-demographic characteristics, including age, education, occupation, marital status, gravidity, and parity (p > 0.05). However, number of ANC visits was significantly associated with uptake (p = 0.006). Although not statistically significant, lower uptake was observed among peri-urban residents and uninsured women. Qualitative findings indicated that while women recognized the benefits of IPTp-SP, side effects such as nausea, dizziness, and discomfort, as well as challenges with tablet formulation and dosing negatively influenced adherence. Conclusions IPTp-SP uptake was high and largely independent of socio-demographic factors but strongly influenced by ANC attendance. Addressing experiential barriers and strengthening patient-centered counselling during ANC may further improve uptake and adherence.

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

Skill-Augmented AI Agents for Medical Research Analysis: An Exploratory Multi-Model Human Evaluation in an NSCLC Transcriptomic Biomarker Task

arXiv:2606.11830v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background. Large language models and AI agents are increasingly used to support biomedical research, but native model outputs may omit key analytical steps, misuse methods, or overstate conclusions. We evaluated whether autonomous access to a medical research skill package was associated with higher-quality AI-generated transcriptomic research-analysis outputs compared with native AI without skills. Methods. We conducted an exploratory multi-model human evaluation using a non-small cell lung cancer immunotherapy biomarker task. Six model backbones were tested. The evaluation included 21 anonymized outputs: 9 native-AI outputs and 12 skill-augmented outputs generated through an AI agent implementation represented by OpenClaw. Four non-expert biomedical reviewers and two blinded experts evaluated each output, with two ratings from each reviewer type. The primary outcome was expert-rated overall quality. Results. Skill-augmented outputs showed directionally higher expert overall quality than native-AI outputs (mean 5.50 vs 5.11; difference=0.39; bootstrap 95\% CI, -0.04 to 0.90; Welch p=0.156). Non-expert reviewer quality showed the same direction (mean 4.72 vs 4.47; difference=0.26; bootstrap 95\% CI, -0.25 to 0.80; Welch p=0.373). Expert agreement was limited (single-rating ICC=-0.15), and model-specific effects were descriptive and heterogeneous. Conclusions. Autonomous skill access showed a directional quality signal in this exploratory sample, but the signal was smaller than expert-rating noise and should not be interpreted as confirmatory evidence. The findings primarily motivate larger evaluations of skill-augmented AI agents with stronger reliability controls, platform replication, and biological-validity assessment.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

AI-Driven Analytics of Team-Teaching Talk: Acoustic Patterns across Experience, Cohorts and the Learning Design

arXiv:2606.09831v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As classroom cohorts expand, team teaching is increasingly used to integrate the expertise and pedagogical perspectives of multiple teachers. Yet, there is limited empirical understanding of how team teaching unfolds in practice, particularly regarding differences in teachers' contributions across experience levels, student cohorts, and learning task design. Prior research on team teaching has largely relied on retrospective self-reports or small-scale observations, offering limited insight into the micro-level processes through which team teaching is enacted. Teacher talk offers a scalable lens on these processes. While research in individual teaching contexts shows that acoustic features of speech (e.g., voice quality, intonation, and loudness) can shape student learning, evidence from team-teaching settings remains scarce. Moreover, capturing such features through manual observation or transcription is especially challenging in team-teaching classrooms, where multiple teachers speak across extended sessions and spatial locations, limiting scalability without automation. Grounded in spatial pedagogy theory and team-teaching research, this paper presents an AI-based speech processing approach to analyse classroom talk in team-teaching settings. We analysed 36 recorded undergraduate and postgraduate sessions involving 12 teachers. Spatial pedagogy behaviours were coded and acoustic features extracted to examine variation across teachers' experience, student cohorts, and the learning task design. The results reveal systematic differences, most notably in loudness dynamics: high-experience teachers, undergraduate classes and collaborative learning tasks exhibited greater loudness variation, suggesting more frequent modulation of volume to foreground key information and support classroom interaction and engagement.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Identifying the risk profile of anemia subtypes and hemodynamic obstetric complications in relation to peripartum cardiomyopathy

Background: Peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM) is a leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide, with worse outcomes associated with African Ancestry and delayed presentation. However, the mechanisms underlying PPCM are incompletely understood. Objective: Use a large, nationwide cohort to explore associations between PPCM and underexplored perinatal risk factors and complications of childbirth. Methods: Public hospital discharge data were obtained from eleven U.S. states between 2003-2019. Delivery hospitalizations, patient characteristics and obstetric complications were identified using ICD-9 and -10 CM codes. Only cases with unique patient identifiers enabling readmission analysis were included. The primary outcome was incident PPCM coded between 30 days antepartum and 150 days postpartum. Results: Of 7,424,916 delivering patients, 5,488 patients were diagnosed with PPCM. Patients with PPCM had higher rates of anemia, anemia of chronic disease (ACD), iron deficiency anemia (IDA), sickle cell disease (SCD), sickle cell trait (SCT), red blood cell (RBC) transfusion, and postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) (p

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coupling-Grouped XY-QAOA for Joint Anomaly-Feature Selection

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting anomalous samples and explanatory features under fixed budgets defines a coupled constrained-optimization problem. Sequential feature-first selection ranks features before choosing samples, which can overlook features whose utility depends on which samples are selected, especially when scores are calibrated from reference data that may be limited, noisy, or drifting. We instead formulate the task as joint sample-feature selection under the same fixed counts. In the analyzed formal model, calibration-error sensitivity grows linearly with the number of samples for feature-first ordering but stays constant for joint selection. We introduce Coupling-Grouped XY-QAOA, a constraint-preserving grouped-angle variant for the resulting optimization problem. On matched sparse IBM Heron R3 benchmarks, a hardware-aware implementation reduces circuit depth by 45.9%-61.3% and two-qubit gates by 2.6%-5.2% relative to Qiskit optimization level 3 on the CZ-basis target. It enables, to our knowledge, the largest reported width-depth configurations for constraint-preserving bipartite-selection QAOA hardware executions with feasible-sector retention: 64 qubits at p=2 and 36 qubits at p=3. The 20-qubit p=5 runs retain 63% valid samples. Across 36-64 qubits, fixed-angle runs yield lower-energy feasible samples than matched random-feasible sampling. Warm starts reduce the gap to strict-feasible classical references by 57.5%-80.5%, and near-budget repair matches the sparse classical reference at 36 qubits. Benchmarks show gains in balanced fixed-budget regimes, and noiseless simulations show that problem-structured angle grouping improves over same-depth XY-QAOA and matched-parameter, type-preserving randomization controls. Overall, the results support calibrated joint selection and hardware-realizable constrained-mixer execution in the tested regimes.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Charge-Conjugation Violation and Population Asymmetry in Bipartite Fermionic Lattices

arXiv:2606.06138v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Charge conjugation violation (CCV) is a central concept in particle physics and appears also for quasiparticles in quantum many-body systems, which typically relies on an embedded external symmetry breaking to the underlying system. An open question is how an intrinsic CCV mechanism could emerge and what its macroscopic consequences would be. We establish sublattice kinks in bipartite fermionic lattices as a concrete setup showing intrinsic CCV. The intrinsic CCV of the sublattice kink is based on the graph-topological nature of the underlying Hamiltonian, with no explicit symmetry breaking taking place. It leads to a population asymmetry of different configurations and imprints a hidden leaf-like structure in the eigenenergy spectrum. The population asymmetry also leads to an imbalanced sublattice-kink production triggered by the vacuum-instability in the quench dynamics. Our work demonstrates the graph topology as the microscopic origin of intrinsic CCV, with the population asymmetry as the macroscopic consequence, of which the proposed setup is highly amenable to experimental implementation via cold-atom quantum simulators.

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

Synthetic Counteradaptation: A Principle of Human-AI Co-evolution

arXiv:2606.15503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the concept of synthetic counteradaptation, a process where human and AI systems co-evolve by adapting to each other's strategies and behaviors. Synthetic counteradaptation occurs when AI systems develop novel strategies or social protocols, prompting humans to extract insights and adapt their own behaviors in response, leading to the emergence of new agent interaction dynamics. To illustrate these dynamics, we analyze examples from various contexts, including the game of Go, mixed-motive social interactions, and geopolitical simulations. By exploring these cases, we demonstrate how synthetic counteradaptation provides a framework for understanding the recursive and co-evolutionary nature of human-AI interactions in multi-agent environments.

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

HiRo: A Compact Four-Directional Hierarchical Reservoir Token-Mixer for Efficient Image Classification

Recent image classification models must balance local feature modeling, cross-window interaction, and parameter efficiency. Many high-performing architectures rely on fully trainable token-mixers, which improve representation learning but increase parameter count, optimization complexity and computational cost. We propose a parameter-efficient image classification model called HiRo that integrates shifted-window partitioning with multi-directional hierarchical reservoir computing. Images are divided into non-overlapping patches (treated as tokens), linearly projected, normalized, and enriched with 2D sinusoidal positional encodings, then processed within local windows. Inside each window, tokens are scanned in four directions and passed through a two-stage slice-and-mix reservoir module. In the first stage, directional sequences are split into contiguous slices, each processed by its own fixed reservoir with a trainable closed-loop readout. The resulting slice outputs are summarized using the start, end, and mean representations, and then mixed by a second-stage fixed reservoir for each direction. The mixed slice representations are expanded back to the token level and fused with the first-stage outputs, after which the four directional outputs are realigned and averaged. Consecutive blocks alternate between regular and shifted windows to enable cross-window interaction, followed by layer normalization, a residual feed-forward network, and global pooling for classification. This design combines regular and shifted window partitioning with hierarchical multi-directional reservoirs to make an efficient local-to-cross-window token-mixing framework for image classification. Despite using under 1M trainable parameters and significantly lower memory and time than transformer-style baselines, HiRo also achieves 99.46%, 85.57%, and 59.10% accuracy on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100, respectively.

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

A Geometric Profile of Semantic Information in Text: Frame-Conditional Uniqueness and a Trade-Off Triangle for Scalar Summaries

How much meaning does a text carry? Shannon's theory measures uncertainty over symbols and is intentionally indifferent to meaning, while pairwise metrics such as BERTScore compare two texts rather than characterizing one. We develop a geometric framework that measures semantic content from the structure of a text's sentence embeddings. The framework has three parts. First, within a fixed embedding and baseline, six natural axioms uniquely determine a scalar measure up to scale, a frame-conditional uniqueness theorem. The resulting scalar is empirically too coarse, motivating a richer representation. Second, we propose a three-coordinate semantic profile capturing novelty (displacement from generic discourse), breadth (diversity of distinct ideas), and integration (connectedness among them), together with a discrete minimal unit (the semantic quantum) whose resolution is fixed by a clustering threshold $\tau$. Third, we prove a no-go theorem: no scalar summary of the profile can simultaneously satisfy analytic stability under paraphrase and concatenation, ordinal robustness across text scales, and cross-representation comparability. We exhibit two practical scalars, $S_{\mathrm{minmax}}$ and $S_{\mathrm{rank}}$, each occupying a distinct corner of this trade-off triangle. Validation across 23 synthetic categories, 5 Project Gutenberg novels, and 3 embedding models confirms the trade-off. The recommended rank-normalized configuration passes 25 of 28 ordinal checks as point estimates (21 of 28 after Benjamini-Hochberg correction), outperforming seven baselines including unigram entropy and a BERTScore-based novelty signal. A separate variational result connects the breadth coordinate to the log-determinant of a determinantal point process (Spearman $\rho = 0.985$ over 507 Gutenberg chapters), giving an optimization-theoretic foundation for breadth.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SHERPA: Seam-aware Harmonized ERP Adaptation for Open-Domain 360$^\circ$ Panorama Generation

Panoramic imagery is increasingly used in world-generation, games, and simulation, where users may need not only photorealistic scenes but also stylized and non-photorealistic environments. Large-scale text-to-image diffusion and flow models provide broad style and semantic priors for this goal, but planar image training misaligns them with the wrap-around topology and polar regions of $360^\circ$ panoramas represented in equirectangular projection (ERP). We present SHERPA, a lightweight adaptation framework that combines frequency-selective Circular RoPE, Circular Latent Encoding/Decoding, image-side FFN adapters, and a Dual-Path Training Scheme. Circular RoPE replaces only the seam-sensitive high-frequency horizontal RoPE band with integer-periodic harmonics while preserving the pretrained lower-frequency spectrum. The Paired Panorama Path supervises geometry, while the Unpaired Style Path uses self-supervised yaw consistency for target-free stylized prompts. As a result, SHERPA generates $360^\circ$ panoramas across both photorealistic panorama domains and open-domain stylized prompts.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Evaluating Deep-Learning Based Quantification of Breast Arterial Calcification on Mammography for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a deep learning model for automated quantification of breast arterial calcification (BAC) on screening mammography and to assess whether AI-derived BAC burden predicts major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in women. Methods: In this retrospective study, 202,006 women who underwent screening mammography without history of MACE were included. A BAC segmentation model was trained on an expert-annotated dataset using a multi-task U-Net with a ResNet-18 encoder to detect and segment BAC. BAC burden was quantified as area (mm{superscript 2}) from model-generated masks using DICOM pixel spacing and categorized by tertiles into low, intermediate, and high. The PREVENT score and incident MACE were identified from electronic health records. Cox proportional hazards models were developed to evaluate AI-derived BAC burden and PREVENT score alone, and combined models for 5 - and 10-year cardiovascular risk prediction. Results: Among 202,006 women (mean age 54.8{+/-}11.7 years), 23.1% had AI-detected BAC, and 7,701 (3.8%) developed incident MACE during a median follow - up of 7.5 years. On the geographically held-out test set, the BAC model achieved an AUROC of 0.97, Dice score of 0.6678, and Pearson correlation of 0.961 between AI-derived and manually annotated BAC burden. BAC burden increased with age and was higher among women who developed MACE. Five - year MACE incidence increased across BAC categories from 1.5% in women without BAC to 6.9% in those with high BAC burden. BAC burden alone showed modest prediction of MACE, with 5-year and 10-year AUROCs of 0.661 and 0.650, respectively, while PREVENT achieved AUROCs of 0.781 and 0.771. Adding BAC to PREVENT produced minimal improvement in discrimination. Conclusion: Deep learning-based BAC quantification from routine mammography is feasible, accurate, and associated with future cardiovascular risk. Although BAC added little to PREVENT for overall discrimination, it may serve as a scalable opportunistic imaging biomarker to identify women at elevated cardiovascular risk and support preventive care.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Detecting Historical Turning Points in Italian Media: A Complex Systems Approach to a Diachronic News Corpus

The increasing availability of large-scale textual corpora has opened new possibilities for data-driven, quantitative approaches to historical analysis using Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, diachronic corpora with historical relevance from the pre-digital era remain scarce and often incomplete. We present a quantitative approach to historical analysis based on the reconstruction and exploration of a diachronic corpus of around 600,000 articles from the Italian newspaper "La Repubblica", covering all the articles published from the 1st of January 1985 to the 31st of December 2000 - a period of major political, social, and geopolitical change in Italy and globally. Using NLP techniques, we analyze the text at both lexical and semantic levels; we then apply tools from complex systems and statistical physics to trace shifts in media discourse over time. This allows us to detect key transition periods, such as the transition from the First Republic to the Second Republic in Italy, or major international conflicts like the Gulf War or the Kosovo War, without relying on prior labeling. The results show how combining computational linguistics with ideas from complex systems can offer new quantitative insight into historical changes, opening up new paths for studying the dynamics of media and society through large-scale textual data.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Surpassing Scale by Efficiency: A Compact 135M Parameter Foundational LLM Natively Adapted for the Bangla Language

While the NLP landscape is dominated by multi-billion parameter architectures, their deployment in low-resource, non-Latin scripts remains computationally prohibitive for edge configurations, mobile systems, and decentralized local hardware. This paper presents bangla-smollm-135m, a highly compact 135-million parameter decoder-only foundational model engineered explicitly for high-efficiency language modeling in the Bangla script. By leveraging a deterministic intersect-and-append token merging strategy between TituLLMs and SmolLM2-135M, the model overcomes subword script fragmentation without destabilizing early pretrained parameter states. In zero-shot multi-task benchmark evaluations (PIQA_bn, OpenBookQA_bn, CommonsenseQA_bn, and Bangla_MMLU), bangla-smollm-135m matches or outperforms models twice its size (Gemma-3-270m) and achieves parity with models in the 1B parameter tier. The model is available at rnnandi/bangla-smollm-135m

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

Plan-and-Verify Video Reward Reasoning with Spatio-Temporal Scene Graph Grounding

Reward models for text-to-video (T2V) generation guide post-training but often fail at fine-grained semantic alignment. We trace this to two structural weaknesses in existing reasoning-based reward models: they do not systematically verify every condition described in the prompt, and the visual evidence supporting each judgment remains implicit in their free-form reasoning. We propose SG-PVR, a video reward model that addresses these limitations through plan-and-verify reasoning grounded in spatio-temporal scene graphs. The verification plan decomposes the prompt into atomic claims, ensuring every requirement is checked. The spatio-temporal scene graph, encoding entities, attributes, and temporally-grounded relations, is extracted from the video and maintained as a persistent structured visual reference throughout reasoning. Each claim is verified against both the video and the scene graph, anchoring judgments in explicit visual evidence. SG-PVR achieves strong performance on semantic alignment, including fine-grained temporal semantics. As a test-time reranker, it further enhances compositional alignment in T2V generation.

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

SkillVetBench: LLM-as-Judge for Multi-Dimensional Security Risk Evaluation in Open-Source LLM Agent Skills

arXiv:2606.15899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source LLM agent ecosystems are growing rapidly, yet the security of community-contributed skills - modular tool definitions that extend agent capabilities - remains largely unvetted. The gap we fill: existing scanners operate at the code layer and are structurally blind to instruction-layer and multi-agent risk - natural-language directives that hijack an agent, exfiltrate data through encoded side channels, or chain harm across pipelines - so what is needed is a semantic, multi-dimensional vetting system rather than another signature matcher. We present SKILLVETBENCH, a live public leaderboard on Hugging Face that uses an LLM-as-Judge to vet agent skills. What is new: SARS (Skill Agentic Risk Score), a five-dimensional agentic-risk metric with a principled weighted formula for instruction-following systems. What is integrated: full CVSS v4.0 vector decomposition and a ClawHub dual-view that places our LLM-generated review beside the official marketplace verdict. What is demonstrated: drawing on our companion benchmark paper [ 1], the LLM-as-Judge stage achieves zero false negatives across 78 confirmed-malicious skills and zero false positives across 22 benign controls, while the best static baseline (SKILLSIEVE) still misses 15%; for instruction-layer categories such as Prompt Injection and Memory Poisoning, conventional tools miss between 89% and 100% of threats (e.g., CODEBERT detects none of nine memory-poisoning skills). Detection rates vary from 35% to 95% across four LLM evaluators, motivating ensemble scoring in production deployments.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Simplicity Suffices for Parameter Noise Injection in Stochastic Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.12054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Injecting noise into the optimization process is a well-established technique for improving the training and generalization of deep neural networks. Yet, despite the breadth of existing approaches, it remains unclear which design choices truly matter in practice. In this work, we investigate parameter noise injection for stochastic gradient descent, focusing on two key questions: how to efficiently pair each training example with its own perturbation in mini-batch training, and whether sophisticated noise parameterizations or multi-sample gradient averaging yield meaningful gains over simpler alternatives. To address the first question, we leverage a distributional identity for linear layers that allows per-example noise injection without breaking batched computation. To address the second, we systematically compare several diagonal Gaussian parameterizations against an isotropic baseline across varying noise levels on CIFAR100. Our results consistently show that simple, lightweight strategies, isotropic noise with a single perturbed forward pass per update step, recover most of the benefit of more complex schemes. These findings suggest that simplicity suffices for parameter noise injection, and that practitioners need not resort to elaborate perturbation designs to reap the optimization and generalization benefits of noisy SGD.

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

Integrating national forest inventory, airborne lidar, and satellite imagery for wall-to-wall mapping of forest structure with computer vision

arXiv:2606.20291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Remote sensing is increasingly relied upon to deliver actionable science for forest and wildfire risk management across large landscapes. Wall-to-wall, annually updated maps are a persistent need for effective forest management. Many planning systems and data collections combine disparate data sources with different purposes, vintages, and prediction quality, which leads to confounding behavior in operational planning systems. We introduce the VibrantForests framework, developed and applied to map forest attributes and provide a coherent foundation for effective forest and wildfire planning. VibrantForests includes a satellite-based forest structure model trained on lidar-derived samples and applied across the contiguous United States to concurrently generate estimates of canopy cover, canopy height, aboveground live tree biomass, basal area, and quadratic mean diameter at 10-meter resolution. We demonstrate predictive capability spanning the full spectrum of forest conditions ranging from sparse-canopy/low-biomass to dense-canopy/high-biomass. Results show that our model extends the range at which saturation is commonly encountered in comparable passive-sensor models, and reduces regression-to-mean behavior that commonly produces overestimation of forest attributes in small/sparse conditions and underestimation in large/dense conditions. The VibrantForests framework addresses a key limitation in large-area forest and wildfire planning by delivering coherent wall-to-wall estimates of management-relevant attributes at annual cadence and 10m resolution.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Estimating vaccine-prevented disease outcomes when vaccination has only direct effects

Vaccination can be a useful intervention for reducing infectious disease burden. Estimating numbers of vaccine-prevented health outcomes is one approach to quantifying the benefits of vaccination. Here we improve a method described by Foppa et al. (1) that assumes vaccination has only direct effects, that is, it cannot prevent infection or onward transmission of the disease. We rederive this method and derive an improved method that increases estimation accuracy with minimal additional analytical complexity. To evaluate the improved method, we simulated disease outbreaks and compared the accuracy of the two methods for estimating prevented disease outcomes. In 84% of simulations performed over a wide parameter space, the improved method had an equal or smaller estimation error compared to the original Foppa method, with 7.9-fold smaller mean error and 44-fold smaller standard deviation of errors. Our study improves a method for estimating prevented burden when assuming vaccination has only direct effects.