Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

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

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

XAI-Grounded Explanation Generation for Speech Deepfake Detection with Training-Free Multimodal Large Language Models

Speech deepfake detection (SDD) systems require trustworthy explanations for reliable decision-making. Existing explanation ways mainly fall into two categories. Traditional explainable AI (XAI), such as gradient-based attribution, produces low-level attribution signals tightly coupled with model decisions, and harder to be understood by human than natural language explanations. Meanwhile, large language model (LLM)-based explanation generation often produces generic and ungrounded descriptions due to the lack of heuristic evidence and task-specific supervision, stemming from limited grounded explanation datasets for SDD. We therefore propose a training-free explanation framework that integrates XAI evidence with multimodal LLMs to generate grounded and specific explanations. Using the PartialSpoof dataset, we construct a grounded explanation dataset and show that methods with XAI increase inside accuracy by over 45\%, verified through human evaluation and faithfulness checks.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Blind Dexterous Grasping via Real2Sim2Real Tactile Policy Learning

arXiv:2606.11767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Blind grasping with a dexterous hand is a crucial manipulation capability. Nevertheless, learning such tactile-only policies for real robots remains challenging due to the tactile sim-to-real gap and the limited expressiveness of sparse tactile signals. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework for tactile-only blind grasping that is deployable on a physical multi-fingered robotic hand. Our approach combines three key components. First, we introduce a Real2Sim tactile calibration pipeline that constructs a contact-calibrated digital-twin simulator capable of reproducing real tactile signals. Second, we improve the expressiveness of sparse tactile observations using a layout-aware tactile encoder, which incorporates sensor-geometry priors through self-supervised pretraining. Third, to improve generalization to unseen objects, we train object-specific reinforcement-learning experts in the calibrated simulator and aggregate their successful grasp trajectories into a tactile-conditioned Diffusion Policy. We evaluate our method on a physical LEAP Hand equipped with distributed tactile sensing across 10 seen and 10 unseen objects. The deployed policy achieves a 27\% real-world grasp success rate across all 20 objects, without real-world grasping demonstrations or visual input. Simulation ablations show that layout-aware tactile pretraining improves grasping performance, while sensing-level evaluations confirm that Real2Sim calibration increases the consistency of tactile contact events between simulation and hardware. Together, these results suggest that contact-event calibration, geometry-aware tactile representation learning, and diffusion-based policy aggregation provide an effective path toward tactile-only blind grasping on real dexterous robotic hands. Project page:Dex-Blind-Grasp.github.io.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Preserved Medial Temporal Lobe Flexibility Predicts Memory Generalization Only in the Context of Good Sleep Quality among Older African Americans

Objectives: Poor sleep quality is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Older African Americans experience disproportionately high rates of sleep disturbance and AD. Medial temporal lobe (MTL) flexibility reflects dynamic neural reorganization and may be a marker of generalization performance. This study examined whether sleep quality moderates the association between MTL flexibility and memory generalization. Methods: Fifty older African Americans (MeanAge=69.7{+/-}6.21 years; 80% women) underwent rs-fMRI to quantify MTL flexibility, Rutgers Acquired Equivalence Task for memory generalization, and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index for sleep quality. Results: Greater MTL flexibility was associated with better generalization (r=0.367, p=.017). Good sleepers showed higher MTL flexibility (F(1,44)=8.11, p2=.156, p=.007) and superior generalization (F(1,46)= 12.33, p2=.211, p=.001). Sleep quality significantly moderated the MTL flexibility and generalization relationship ({beta}=-1.519, p=.012). Conclusions: Preserved MTL flexibility may confer generalization only in good sleepers, suggesting that sleep disturbance may disrupt the MTL neural resilience among older African Americans.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Detecting undisclosed LLM-generated content in parliamentary texts

In this paper, we evaluate the extent of undisclosed LLM-generated content in texts from the parliaments of the United Kingdom and Sweden. In many areas, such as in journalism or in academic writing, there are often requirements to clearly disclose whether AI tools, such as LLMs, have been used. In the case of parliamentary texts, the guidelines on disclosure of AI use are more vague. However, in order to maintain transparency and retain public trust, it is generally recommended that parliamentarians should state whether or not they have used AI when writing texts, such as parliamentary motions. Here, we train an interpretable (glass-box) text classifier using pre-LLM parliamentary texts and LLM-generated versions of such texts. We then apply the classifier to a test set containing recent parliamentary texts, finding a steady increase in undisclosed LLM use, in both parliaments, from 2022 onwards.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

When Generator Replay Degrades: Projected Rehearsal Orchestration for Heterogeneous Federated Class-Incremental Learning

arXiv:2606.15695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated class-incremental learning (FCIL) becomes substantially harder when clients observe different label subsets, progress through tasks at different stages, and provide uneven supervision for the same semantic concepts. Existing FCIL methods often preserve old knowledge through input-space synthesis, but they can be fragile under heterogeneous task streams and difficult to transfer across modalities. To alleviate such issues, we propose PRO, a framework that replaces synthetic input replay with projected rehearsal orchestration. To remove external pretraining, we evaluate all methods under the same warmup. After this, PRO maintains compact class-level projected memories on the server and allows clients perform balanced pseudo multi-task training over current examples and old projected memories. To handle stronger representation drift, we further introduce PRO-MAX, which augments PRO with neighborhood-weighted memory alignment while preserving the same server-light principle that the server only aggregates model updates and memory statistics. Across image, text, and graph benchmarks, PRO and PRO-MAX improve retention and final utility under heterogeneous streams while remaining competitive in homogeneous FCIL. Even when baselines are given expanded replay budgets, they degrade under supervision imbalance and stage misalignment, indicating that replay quantity alone does not resolve replay-quality failures. Additional weak-task diagnostics further show that larger replay mismatch is associated with larger downstream degradation, while our method keeps projected memories better aligned with the evolving representation.

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

MoCo-AIS: A Contrastive Learning Framework for Similarity Computation of Vessel Trajectories

arXiv:2606.17978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trajectory similarity is a fundamental task in analyzing mobility patterns, essential for applications such as route pattern extraction, mobility prediction, and anomaly detection. Traditional distance-based measures for computing similarity incur high computational cost, driving the adoption of lightweight learning-based approaches. Supervised methods rely on extensive labels derived from traditional distance measures and often reproduce these metrics, which limits generalization. While self-supervised learning addresses this issue through contrastive learning, it lacks a unified framework, making it difficult to compare deep learning (DL) models for consistent trajectory representation. Accordingly, this paper presents MoCo-AIS, a unified framework for learning vessel trajectory embeddings based on the Momentum Contrast (MoCo) paradigm, which formulates similarity learning through positive and negative trajectory pairs. Within this framework, we evaluate a diverse set of leading DL models on large-scale, real-world vessel-tracking AIS datasets that capture diverse navigation behaviors and operating conditions. Results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves similarity learning over existing baselines, while providing a benchmarking platform for evaluating trajectory representation models.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Trimodal Glioma Representation Alignment via Volumetric Contrastive Learning

Glioma grading and survival prediction require the integration of heterogeneous information collected at different spatial and biological scales. Histopathology describes tissue morphology, mRNA expression captures molecular activity, and magnetic resonance imaging provides a non-invasive view of tumor extent and radiological heterogeneity. Existing glioma prognosis models often combine only two of these sources, while their alignment objectives remain mostly pairwise. This paper introduces GLORIA, a novel trimodal framework for GLioma Omics - Radiology - hIstopathology Alignment. GLORIA processes whole-slide image regions, gene-expression profiles, and 3D MRI volumes through modality-specific encoders, projects them into a shared latent space, and aligns them with a Gramian contrastive loss that measures the volume spanned by the three modality embeddings. The aligned representations are fused through a cross-modal gating module and optimized jointly for three-class glioma grading and overall survival prediction. We evaluate GLORIA on a matched TCGA-GBM/LGG and BraTS21 cohort, comprising 132 patients with all three modalities. On the shared trimodal test set, GLORIA improves over the bimodal WSI-mRNA baseline in all the metrics considered.

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

Variational Deep Unfolding with Mamba-Based Nonlocal Modeling for Underwater Image Enhancement

Underwater imaging plays a crucial role in ocean engineering, although captured data often suffer from poor visibility and color distortion. To address these challenges, we propose a model-based deep unfolding network for underwater image enhancement that integrates variational modeling into a learnable architecture. The framework is guided by a variational formulation based on a dehazing decomposition, incorporating a multiplicative residual component to absorb remaining artifacts and a nonlocal gradient-type constraint to preserve structural details and enhance edge sharpness. We provide a theoretical analysis establishing the existence of solution for the associated minimization problem. The proposed unfolding method incorporates Mamba layers to efficiently capture self-similarities in the scene. In addition, we introduce a proximal trajectory loss that enforces consistency between the unfolding stages and the iterations of an ideal restoration regularizer. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed unfolding approach achieves improved visual quality and competitive quantitative performance compared with recent state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be available at https://github.com/MIA-UIB/Variational-Unfolding-Mamba-Underwater-Enhancement .

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

Reverse Flow Matching: A Unified Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion and Flow Policies

arXiv:2601.08136v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion and flow policies are gaining prominence in online reinforcement learning (RL) due to their expressive power, yet training them efficiently remains a critical challenge. A fundamental difficulty that distinguishes online RL from standard generative modeling is the lack of direct samples from the target Boltzmann distribution defined by the Q-function. To address this, two seemingly distinct families of methods have been proposed for diffusion policies: a noise-expectation family, which uses a weighted average of noise as the training target, and a gradient-expectation family, which employs a weighted average of Q-function gradients. However, it remains unclear how these objectives are formally related, or whether they can be synthesized into a more general formulation. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, reverse flow matching (RFM), which rigorously addresses the problem of training diffusion and flow models without direct target samples. By adopting a reverse inferential perspective, we formulate the training target as a posterior mean estimation problem given an intermediate noisy sample. Crucially, we introduce Langevin Stein operators to construct zero-mean control variates, deriving a general class of estimators that share the same expectation. We show that existing noise-expectation and gradient-expectation methods are simply two specific instances within this broader class. This unified view yields two key advancements: it extends the capability of targeting Boltzmann distributions from diffusion to flow policies, and it enables the principled combination of Q-value and Q-gradient information to form an effective estimator, thereby improving training efficiency and stability. We instantiate RFM to train a flow policy in online RL and demonstrate improved performance on continuous-control benchmarks compared to diffusion policy baselines.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry

arXiv:2606.14249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance depends critically on the runtime harness, comprising the prompts, tools, memory, and control flow that mediate how a model observes, reasons, and acts. Yet today's harnesses remain largely hand-crafted and static: each new model or task still demands bespoke scaffolding, and the rich traces produced during execution are rarely distilled back into systematic improvement. We introduce HarnessX, a foundry for composable, adaptive, and evolvable agent harnesses. HarnessX assembles typed harness primitives via a substitution algebra, adapts them through AEGIS, a trace-driven multi-agent evolution engine grounded in an operational mirror between symbolic adaptation and reinforcement learning, and closes the harness-model loop by turning trajectories into both harness updates and model training signal. Across five benchmarks (ALFWorld, GAIA, WebShop, tau^3-Bench, and SWE-bench Verified), HarnessX yields an average gain of +14.5% (up to +44.0%), with gains largest where baselines are lowest. These results suggest that agent progress need not come from model scaling alone: composing and evolving runtime interfaces from execution feedback is an actionable and complementary lever. The complete codebase will be open-sourced in a future release.

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

A Multifaceted Analysis of Social Biases in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly become indispensable tools for acquiring information and supporting human decision-making. However, ensuring that these models uphold fairness across varied contexts is critical to their safe and responsible deployment. In this study, we undertake a comprehensive examination of four widely adopted LLMs, probing their underlying biases and inclinations across the dimensions of politics, ideology, alliance, language, and gender. Through a series of carefully designed experiments, we investigate their political neutrality using news summarization, ideological biases through news stance classification, tendencies toward specific geopolitical alliances via United Nations voting patterns, language bias in the context of multilingual story completion, and gender-related affinities as revealed by responses to the World Values Survey. Results indicate that while the LLMs are aligned to be neutral and impartial, they still show biases and affinities of different types.

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

An Explainable AI Assistant for Introductory Programming Education: Improving Feedback Reliability with Instructor-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2606.12425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Active learning is widely recognized as an effective approach for improving learning outcomes in introductory programming courses. However, insufficient instructional support often limits students' access to timely, personalized feedback, which is crucial for mastering foundational programming concepts. Although recent advances in AI, particularly large language models, offer scalable opportunities for feedback, concerns about explainability and reliability remain. In this paper, we present an AI-driven classroom assistant that leverages an explainable AI model to analyze student code, map logical errors to instructor-identified misconceptions, and deliver instructor-authored feedback, thereby grounding reliability in instructor-defined pedagogical knowledge. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we conducted an expert evaluation to examine its alignment with instructor-verified feedback and deployed the system in a classroom setting to assess students' perceptions of its usability. Results indicate that the assistant can provide accurate, instructor-verified feedback to students while fostering a positive experience.

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

Constrained Diffusion Models with Primal-Dual Inference

arXiv:2606.17192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper develops constrained diffusion models with primal-dual inference (PDI) to sample from optimal distributions of entropy-regularized optimization problems with average constraints. We formalize constrained sampling in the Lagrangian dual domain, where the optimal distribution takes the form of a Gibbs distribution indexed by the optimal dual variable. Rather than estimating this dual multiplier before sampling and freezing it throughout generation, PDI jointly infers the optimal primal distribution and its parametrizing dual variable. Each reverse diffusion step denoises using the score field associated with the current multiplier and then updates the multiplier through dual ascent using the estimated constraint violation of the denoised samples. To enable this conditional score field, we train a single dual-conditioned score network over the family of Gibbs distributions induced by the dual variables encountered during inference. We prove that the time average of the dual variables generated along the inference trajectory converges to a neighborhood of the dual optimum and bound the effect of residual dual mismatch on the terminal distribution through schedule-dependent stability factors. We evaluate PDI on constrained sampling from a mixture of Gaussians, wireless resource allocation, and portfolio management.

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

Identifying Structural Biases from Causal Mechanism Shifts

arXiv:2606.18834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery methods commonly assume that all data is independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and that there are no unmeasured variables affecting the system. In practice, these assumptions are often violated, leading to inaccurate inference. In this paper, we study how to identify hidden confounding and selection biases from causal mechanism shifts. In particular, we show that structural biases lead to dependent mechanism shifts. That is, by considering for which variables the mechanisms change given data from different environments, we can tell which variables are unbiased, which are subject to hidden confounding, and which are undergoing selection bias. We formalize this into an empirically testable criterion based on mutual information, and show under which conditions it identifies structural biases. To tell which nodes are subject to what kind of bias, we introduce the StruBI algorithm. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that StruBI works well in practice, accurately recovering affected variable sets and types of biases, outperforming the state-of-the-art by a wide margin.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ReAge3D: Re-Aging 3D Faces with View Consistency

We present a novel framework for realistic and controllable 3D face re-aging which produces highly detailed, identity-preserving results. Existing 3D editing methods, while effective for coarse semantic changes, are not well suited for re-aging, as even small inconsistencies across re-aged 2D views can lead to over-smoothing of subtle but perceptually important age-related details. To address this challenge, we first introduce a 2D diffusion-based re-aging model, DiffReaging, trained on synthetically generated image pairs. We further propose a center-out editing propagation strategy that leverages this re-aging model to reconstruct multi-view-consistent re-aged images. Specifically, starting from a re-aged frontal pivot view, we reconstruct the remaining views through warping and our proposed Masked-DiffReaging process. By injecting existing content at every step of the diffusion process, Masked-DiffReaging ensures that the reconstructed regions remain coherent with existing pixels. The resulting consistent set of re-aged views supervises the optimization of the re-aged 3D representation. Our method outperforms existing 3D editing techniques both visually and quantitatively, enabling smooth, fine-grained control over age transformations in 3D face models.

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

Will AI Agents Free Us From Meaningless Work? A Human-Centered Analysis

arXiv:2606.12430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Some claim that AI agents will free workers from the boring parts of their jobs, yet little is known about how workers themselves identify which tasks should be automated. Prior research focuses on occupations, overlooking that workers experience varying levels of meaning across tasks within the same role. We address this gap with a task-level analysis grounded in Graeber's theory of bullshit jobs. Using ratings from 202 workers on 171 workplace tasks, we (1) validate a five-item scale of perceived bullshitness, (2) show that perceived bullshitness strongly predicts desire for AI delegation, and (3) find that such tasks are also seen as requiring less human oversight. Together, these findings suggest that tasks perceived as bullshit are natural candidates for AI delegation, aligning worker preferences with perceived feasibility.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Smol-GS: Compact Representations for Abstract 3D Gaussian Splatting

We present Smol-GS, a novel method for learning compact representations for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our approach learns highly efficient splat-wise features to model 3D space, which capture abstracted cues, including color, opacity, transformation, and material properties. We propose octree-derived positional encoding, which explicitly models spatial locality and enhances representation efficiency. We further apply entropy-based compression to exploit feature redundancy and compress splat coordinates using a recursive voxel hierarchy. This design enables orders-of-magnitude reduction in storage while preserving representation flexibility. Smol-GS achieves state-of-the-art compression performance on standard benchmarks with high-level rendering quality.

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

Same-Origin Policy for Agentic Browsers

Agentic browsers integrate autonomous AI agents into web browsers, enabling users to accomplish web tasks through natural-language instructions. The same-origin policy (SOP) is a fundamental browser security mechanism that prevents unauthorized automated cross-origin data flows induced by scripts. However, whether SOP remains effective in agentic browsers is an open question that has not been systematically studied. In this work, we bridge this gap. We first observe that an agentic browser can itself serve as an automated channel for cross-origin data flows, potentially leading to SOP violations. To investigate this phenomenon, we construct SOPBench, a benchmark for evaluating SOP violations in agentic browsers. Our evaluation shows that existing agentic browsers frequently violate SOP, both in benign settings and under attacks. To address this problem, we propose SOPGuard, an SOP enforcement mechanism tailored to agentic browsers. We implement SOPGuard in BrowserOS, an open-source agentic browser. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SOPGuard effectively enforces SOP while preserving utility and incurring only a small runtime overhead. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/wxl-lxw/BrowserOS-SOPGuard.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The AI Legal Specialist: A Juridically Autonomous Professional Profile for AI Governance

arXiv:2606.12415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid global expansion of artificial intelligence regulation has generated, across multiple jurisdictions, a demand for legal expertise dedicated to AI that the market has addressed in a fragmented manner. Data protection officers extend their remit beyond data protection law; privacy lawyers reposition themselves toward AI; compliance officers add AI chapters to their existing manuals. This paper argues that none of these adaptive responses adequately covers the professional space opened by the emerging global AI regulatory landscape, of which the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) is the most comprehensive instance, alongside the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, the United States executive and sectoral framework, and analogous initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, China, Japan, Singapore, and beyond. A distinct professional profile is required: the AI Legal Specialist, conceived as a jurist – understood broadly to encompass any professional with advanced legal training – operating at the intersection of legal interpretation and AI governance. The profile is juridically autonomous: it derives its existence from the structure of regulatory obligations generated wherever AI is subject to substantive regulation, rather than from any technical standard or the extension of adjacent roles. The paper provides a juridically grounded definition of the profile, argues for its autonomy from adjacent figures and international standards, proposes a reference competence architecture aligned with the European e-Competence Framework (e-CF, EN 16234-1) as a methodological choice, and articulates the conditions for its operational measurement through key performance indicators. The contribution is intended as a foundation for international standardization of the profile and as a reference for practice, curricula, and adoption across jurisdictions.

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

CoMNeT: A MedNeXt-CorrDiff Framework for Volumetric Brain Tumor Segmentation

Accurate brain tumor segmentation from multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is critical for treatment planning, response assessment, and quantitative neuro-oncology research. However, automated segmentation remains a difficult task in computer vision because of variation in tumor appearance and MRI protocols across patient scans. Moreover, clinically important regions such as enhancing tumor (ET) and tumor core (TC) are often small relative to the full brain volume, furthering increasing the difficulty of achieving high voxel-level precision. In this paper, we show that combining a modern 3D convolutional segmentation model with corrective diffusion-based refinement and ensembling improves volumetric glioma segmentation on the UTSW-Glioma dataset. We propose CoMNeT, a MedNeXt-CorrDiff framework that uses four MRI modalities as input and predicts ET, TC, and whole tumor (WT) regions for automated brain tumor segmentation. MedNeXt is used as the primary segmentation model with Global Response Normalization for feature learning, while CorrDiff is trained as a postprocessing residual refinement method to correct errors in the probability maps before final thresholding. Using five-fold cross-validation, CoMNeT achieved the highest Dice score for most tumor regions, with ET, TC, WT, and average Dice scores of 0.7543 +/- 0.0261, 0.6806 +/- 0.0166, 0.9049 +/- 0.0128, and 0.7798 +/- 0.0184, respectively. CoMNeT outperformed two selected baseline models: SegResNet (0.7555 +/- 0.0190 average Dice) and standalone MedNeXt (0.7697 +/- 0.0154 average Dice). Our findings support the use of corrective diffusion and fold-level probability ensembling as practical additions to existing state-of-the-art 3D convolutional models for automated glioma segmentation.

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

SHIFT: Semantic Harmonization via Index-side Feature Transformation for Multilingual Information Retrieval

arXiv:2606.18801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the rapid expansion of massive multilingual corpora, Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR) has emerged as a critical technology for global information access. MLIR enables users to retrieve semantically relevant documents from multilingual text collections using a single-language query. However, recent multilingual dense retrieval models often exhibit a strong preference for documents in the same language as the query. This leads to severe language bias, where top-ranked results are dominated by documents of specific languages, even when documents in other languages contain more semantically relevant information. To address this issue, we propose SHIFT, a training-free method applicable in the indexing stage. Specifically, SHIFT utilizes parallel translation pairs to estimate a relative language vector for each target language with respect to a source language. Subsequently, SHIFT corrects the language-specific offset by subtracting this relative language vector from document embeddings during indexing. Our comprehensive evaluation across four MLIR benchmarks and diverse dense retrieval models confirms that SHIFT can effectively mitigate language bias and enhance MLIR performance.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Assessment of occupational aerosol exposure for laboratory technicians: A quantitative study using {Phi}X174 phage as a substitute virus

Authors:

This study aimed to clarify aerosol exposure risks throughout the workflow of a Biosafety Level 2 (BSL-2) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) laboratory, validate the suitability of the {Phi}X174 bacteriophage as an indicator virus, and provide evidence for biosafety control measures. The {Phi}X174 bacteriophage was used to simulate viral samples, and a concentration-bacteriophage plaque standard curve was constructed (R2=0.998). Five operational steps in a simulated PCR laboratory were quantitatively monitored for aerosol concentration using double-layer agar plates, with blank controls used to eliminate interference. Statistical analysis was employed to identify risk differences. Sample homogenization ((5.67 {+/-} 1.23) x 104 plaque-forming units (PFU)/m3) and nucleic acid extraction ((3.45 {+/-} 0.89) x 104 PFU/m3) were identified as high-/very high-risk steps. The viral load in the samples was strongly positively correlated with the aerosol concentration (r = 0.926, P

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

CoCoSI: Collaborative Cognitive Map Construction for Spatial Intelligence

Spatial intelligence is a key frontier for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), enabling them to reason about the physical world from visual experience. Inspired by human spatial cognition, recent approaches construct grid-based cognitive maps from multi-frame visual inputs to maintain coherent spatial representations over time. However, limited context lengths still challenge spatial understanding, while existing methods, such as long-context modeling and external memory, often require architectural changes, memory modules, or finetuning, limiting their applicability to off-the-shelf pretrained MLLMs. This motivates a lightweight, model-agnostic method for preserving spatial information beyond the native context window. To this end, we propose a plug-and-play multi-agent framework that collaboratively constructs cognitive maps as structured spatial memory, enhancing the spatial understanding of arbitrary pretrained MLLMs without architectural modification or additional training. Our framework features local-global agent coordination, cognitive map construction with atomic commits, and cross-agent verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on spatial understanding tasks while remaining fully training-free. Code will be released.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Counterintuitive problems in discrete probability

arXiv:2606.07516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This manuscript contains a collection of counterintuitive problems in discrete probability, together with detailed solutions. The dataset was constructed as part of a broader research project investigating the capabilities of the latest-generation Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving discrete probability problems, in order to assess whether LLMs tend to make systematic reasoning errors associated with known cognitive biases. The problems collected here are specifically designed to challenge heuristic reasoning strategies that often lead to intuitively appealing but mathematically incorrect conclusions. The dataset combines several types of problems. Some are adapted from classical probabilistic paradoxes and cognitive-bias literature, while others originate from recreational mathematics sources or were developed by ourselves following similar principles. The primary purpose of this document is to provide a transparent and publicly accessible reference for the problems used in our experimental evaluation of language models, as well as providing detailed human-made solutions. At the same time, we believe that this collection may also prove useful for future research on probabilistic reasoning, cognitive biases, and the evaluation of reasoning capabilities in artificial intelligence systems.

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

Prediction-Powered Risk Monitoring of Deployed Models for Detecting Harmful Distribution Shifts

arXiv:2602.02229v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the problem of monitoring model performance in dynamic environments where labeled data are limited. To this end, we propose prediction-powered risk monitoring (PPRM), a semi-supervised risk-monitoring approach based on prediction-powered inference (PPI). PPRM constructs anytime-valid lower bounds on the running risk by combining synthetic labels with a small set of true labels. Harmful shifts are detected via a threshold-based comparison with an upper bound on the nominal risk, satisfying assumption-free finite-sample guarantees on the type-I error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PPRM through extensive experiments on image classification, large language model (LLM), and telecommunications monitoring tasks.