Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

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

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

On-Policy Distillation with Curriculum Turn-level Guidance for Multi-turn Agents

arXiv:2606.15912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-turn agents that plan, invoke tools, and interact with environments offer a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks, yet their capabilities typically rely on very large models whose inference cost is prohibitive in practice.On-Policy Distillation (OPD) is a natural recipe for transferring such capabilities to smaller students, but we find that it suffers a characteristic failure mode in this setting: small student errors compound across turns and push the trajectory out of the teacher's familiar state distribution, so the teacher's supervision becomes least reliable precisely where the student needs it most.We propose Guided On-Policy Distillation (Guided-OPD), a simple yet effective algorithm that mixes teacher- and student-generated turns within each rollout and schedules the teacher's intervention probability along a curriculum that decays to zero.Strong guidance keeps early trajectories close to the teacher distribution and is then gradually withdrawn to recover the purely on-policy regime used at inference.On ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop, distilling Qwen3 students from a Qwen3-30B-A3B teacher, Guided-OPD improves Score by 21.1\% and Success Rate by 25.5\% over vanilla OPD on average, with larger gains on smaller students.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Vortex: Multi-Modal Fusion System for Intelligent Video Retrieval

This paper presents Vortex, the multimodal video retrieval system developed by our team, FocusOnFun, for the Ho Chi Minh City AI Challenge 2025, designed to advance intelligent multimedia search and temporal reasoning. The system integrates adaptive keyframe extraction, multimodal metadata generation from vision-language and speech models, and a hybrid retrieval strategy that fuses CLIP and SigLIP2 embeddings through Reciprocal Rank Fusion to balance global and fine-grained semantics. To enhance interactivity, Vortex incorporates Rocchio-based relevance feedback and a multi-stage temporal search mechanism for sequential event alignment. Built on Milvus and Elasticsearch, the architecture enables scalable indexing and efficient retrieval. Evaluated in the official competition, our FocusOnFun team's system achieved a score of 79.6/88 (90.5\%) in the Preliminary Round and was further evaluated in the Final Round, achieving an `Excellent' overall performance with `Outstanding' results in the question-answering (QA) task. This demonstrating the complementary strengths of CLIP and SigLIP2 and confirming the effectiveness of the hybrid retrieval approach. The system establishes a robust foundation for future research in intelligent, context-aware, and interactive video retrieval.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedback

We present FronTalk, a benchmark for front-end code generation that pioneers the study of a unique interaction dynamic: conversational code generation with multi-modal feedback. In front-end development, visual artifacts such as sketches, mockups and annotated creenshots are essential for conveying design intent, yet their role in multi-turn code generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the front-end development task and curate FronTalk, a collection of 100 multi-turn dialogues derived from real-world websites across diverse domains such as news, finance, and art. Each turn features both a textual instruction and an equivalent visual instruction, each representing the same user intent. To comprehensively evaluate model performance, we propose a novel agent-based evaluation framework leveraging a web agent to simulate users and explore the website, and thus measuring both functional correctness and user experience. Evaluation of 20 models reveals two key challenges that are under-explored systematically in the literature: (1) a significant forgetting issue where models overwrite previously implemented features, resulting in task failures, and (2) a persistent challenge in interpreting visual feedback, especially for open-source vision-language models (VLMs). We propose a strong baseline to tackle the forgetting issue with AceCoder, a method that critiques the implementation of every past instruction using an autonomous web agent. This approach significantly reduces forgetting to nearly zero and improves the performance by up to 9.3% (56.0% to 65.3%). Overall, we aim to provide a solid foundation for future research in front-end development and the general interaction dynamics of multi-turn, multi-modal code generation. Code and data are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/frontalk

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Resolving Diagnostic Discordance in Group 2 Pulmonary Hypertension Through Staged Physiologic Testing: Insights From PVDOMICS

Background World Symposium on Pulmonary Hypertension (WSPH) Group 2 pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a clinically integrated phenotype attributed to left heart disease, whereas pre- versus post-capillary classification is operationalized primarily by pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (PCWP). Although current recommendations emphasize contextual interpretation and provocative testing for intermediate PCWP values, the relationship between PCWP-based classification and underlying phenotype has not been systematically evaluated. We aim to quantify phenotype-hemodynamic discordance across the PCWP spectrum and evaluate a staged physiology-guided framework incorporating inhaled nitric oxide (iNO), ventricular geometry, and provocative testing. Methods We studied 1,032 participants from the NHLBI-sponsored PVDOMICS cohort with multidisciplinary adjudicated phenotypes integrating clinical, imaging, physiologic, and hemodynamic data. Stage-specific PCWP thresholds classified pre- versus post-capillary physiology at rest, during iNO, and during provocation (fluid challenge or invasive cardiopulmonary exercise testing [iCPET]). Echocardiographic right ventricular-to-left ventricular (RV/LV) ratio was evaluated as a marker of ventricular interdependence. Restricted cubic spline and staged concordance analyses defined certainty-based PCWP ranges and incremental diagnostic yield. Results Adjudicated Group 2 phenotype was present in 37.0% of participants. Resting PCWP demonstrated good discrimination (AUC 0.86), but substantial bidirectional phenotype-hemodynamic discordance persisted across intermediate PCWP ranges. At a resting PCWP of 12 mmHg, 25% of participants classified as pre-capillary had adjudicated Group 2 PH, whereas at 18 mmHg, 35% classified as post-capillary remained discordant non-Group 2. Concordance did not approach 90% until PCWP values were 24 mmHg. Dynamic testing incrementally improved concordance within these overlap zones. Nearly half of adjudicated Group 2 PH participants (46.5%) were not identified by resting PCWP alone; incorporation of iNO and provocative testing increased cumulative Group 2 identification by 63.4% and improved sensitivity from 79.9% to 83.7%. Model discrimination improved from an AUC of 0.863 to 0.908 (likelihood-ratio P

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Limit theorems for descents and inversions of shelf-shuffles

arXiv:2510.00343v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove central limit theorems for the number of descents and inversions of permutations produced by shelf-shuffles. These are a model for casino card shuffling machines. We show the asymptotic normality of the number of descents in two limiting regimes depending on the ratio of cards to shelves. On the other hand, we study the inversions by employing a modification of the techniques from Islak's analysis of the statistics of riffle shuffles. In particular, we obtain a bound for the rate of convergence for inversions that is independent of the number of shelves.

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

Acceleration-induced spectral blind spots in stimulated atomic transitions

arXiv:2606.17396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stimulated transitions are among the most fundamental processes in light-matter interaction, underlying resonant absorption and emission in atomic systems. Here we show that uniform acceleration can convert this familiar response into a frequency-selective absence of response. Specifically, when an incident photon has a nonzero momentum component transverse to the acceleration, the stimulated transition probability vanishes at a discrete set of frequencies fixed by the acceleration, the atomic transition frequency, and the photon propagation angle. At these spectral blind spots, both ordinary stimulated absorption and acceleration-induced excitation are simultaneously suppressed, rendering the atom effectively unresponsive to the incident radiation. The effect arises from the nontrivial response of accelerated atoms to quantum vacuum fluctuations and provides a distinctive signature of the Unruh effect through the absence, rather than the enhancement, of stimulated transitions. We further provide an order-of-magnitude estimate showing that an electron-based implementation with spin splitting in combined electric and magnetic fields could access the required parameter regime. These results reveal an unexplored form of acceleration-modified light-matter interaction and identify spectral blind spots as a new manifestation of the Unruh effect.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

GraphInfer-Bench: Benchmarking LLM's Inference Capability on Graphs

Graph analysis underlies many applications whose answers cannot be looked up in a single record or retrieved along a path: laundering rings, drug repurposing, user preference, and scientific theme are all inferred from a node together with its neighbourhood. We introduce GraphInfer-Bench, a benchmark for whether LLMs can perform this graph inference: producing an open-ended answer that no single node supports and no path retrieves. Existing graph-QA protocols cannot test this capability: algorithm simulation, node classification, single-node description, KG-QA, and GraphRAG all admit answers retrievable from one node or along a path. GraphInfer-Bench defines five tasks along Description (what a region is) and Comparison (how regions differ), each constructed so the ground truth lives in no single node. The release contains 42,000 samples across six real-world graphs, produced automatically and screened by a four-layer quality-control protocol. We evaluate four method families against the same tasks: graph-token alignment models, zero-shot frontier closed-source LLMs, Graph2Text supervised fine-tuning, and plain GNNs as a structural reference. No method family closes the gap. Graph-token alignment partially handles description tasks (relational, theme) but collapses on comparison tasks. Frontier LLMs lead on outlier detection and community partition among LLM-based methods but lag on masked-node prediction. Graph2Text SFT is the strongest LLM-based method on the description side yet falls behind frontier LLMs on comparison. Across every task, plain GNNs match or beat the strongest LLM-based row, with the largest margin on community detection. GraphInfer-Bench surfaces graph inference as an open capability gap rather than a property of any one architecture.

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

Embodied-R1.5: Evolving Physical Intelligence via Embodied Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.11324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Embodied-R1.5, a unified Embodied Foundation Model (EFM) that integrates comprehensive embodied reasoning capabilities, spanning embodied cognition, task planning, correction, and pointing, within a single architecture toward general physical intelligence. Leveraging three automated data construction pipelines to significantly expand the data coverage of critical capabilities, we build a large-scale data system of over 15B tokens, and design a multi-task balanced RL recipe to alleviate heterogeneous task conflicts. We further introduce a Planner-Grounder-Corrector (PGC) closed-loop framework that enables a single model to autonomously execute and self-correct over long-horizon tasks. With only 8B parameters, Embodied-R1.5 achieves SOTA on 16 out of 24 embodied VLM benchmarks, surpassing leading models like Gemini-Robotics-ER-1.5 and GPT-5.4. Benefiting from the internalized embodied capabilities, Embodied-R1.5 can be fine-tuned into a VLA with only a small amount of data, outperforming leading VLA models like $\pi_{0.5}$ across 4 popular manipulation benchmark suites. We further conduct extensive zero-shot real-robot experiments, validating performance in instruction following, affordance grounding, articulated object manipulation, and long-horizon complex tasks, demonstrating strong generalization to the physical world. We open-source model weights, datasets, training code, and EmbodiedEvalKit, an evaluation framework tailored for embodied tasks, to facilitate future research in EFMs.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

OmniSapiens: A Foundation Model for Social Behavior Processing via Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv:2602.10635v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Socially intelligent AI systems must reason across diverse human behavioral tasks and generalize to new social contexts. However, behavioral data is inherently heterogeneous, comprising diverse modalities and prediction targets that produce uneven training signals across samples, creating imbalanced learning dynamics that challenge existing AI models. To address this, we develop Omnisapiens-7B 2.0, a foundation model for social behavior processing that explicitly addresses learning from heterogeneous behavioral data. This is enabled through Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization, a new RL method that rebalances learning signals across samples by approximating each sample's contribution to the policy update and using these estimates to drive geometrically centered, inertially smoothed advantage modulation for stable training. Omnisapiens-7B 2.0 achieves the best and most consistent performance across 10 behavioral tasks, while also attaining the best performance on all five held-out benchmarks, with gains of up to +12.02% and +9.37% respectively. Furthermore, it demonstrates more consistent and interpretable reasoning traces, supporting reliable real-world behavioral applications. Our model is available at https://github.com/MIT-MI/human_behavior_atlas.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

LP-Based Algorithms for Scheduling in a Quantum Switch

Authors:

arXiv:2603.27812v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider scheduling in a quantum switch with stochastic entanglement generation, finite quantum memories, and decoherence. The objective is to design a scheduling algorithm with polynomial-time computational complexity that stabilizes a nontrivial fraction of the capacity region. Scheduling in such a switch corresponds to finding a matching in a graph subject to additional constraints. We propose an LP-based policy, which finds a point in the matching polytope, which is further implemented using a randomized decomposition into matchings. The main challenge is that service over an edge is feasible only when entanglement is simultaneously available at both endpoint memories, so the effective service rates depend on the steady-state availability induced by the scheduling rule. To address this, we introduce a single-node reference Markov chain and derive lower bounds on achievable service rates in terms of the steady-state nonemptiness probabilities. We then use a Lyapunov drift argument to show that, whenever the request arrival rates lie within the resulting throughput region, the proposed algorithm stabilizes the request queues. We further analyze how the achievable throughput depends on entanglement generation rates, decoherence probabilities, and buffer sizes, and show that the throughput lower bound converges exponentially fast to its infinite-buffer limit as the memory size increases. Numerical results illustrate that the guaranteed throughput fraction is substantial for parameter regimes relevant to near-term quantum networking systems.

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

Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories

arXiv:2602.02028v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

arXiv:2606.04935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

LLM agent safety, multi-turn red-teaming, jailbreak benchmarks, adversarial robustness, safety-critical systems

arXiv:2606.20408v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly proposed as supervisory components for safety-critical systems, yet their robustness under sustained, adaptive adversarial pressure remains poorly characterized. We present NRT-Bench, a benchmark for multi-turn red-teaming of LLM agents acting as operators of a safety-critical system, instantiated in a simulated nuclear power plant control room. A five-role operator team, each backed by a configurable LLM, runs a plant governed by six critical safety functions (CSFs), while adversaries inject messages over four channels in bounded multi-turn sessions with per-turn feedback. Harm is an objective signal rather than LLM-judged text: a run terminates the moment any CSF is lost, attributed to the causing message. Evaluating four frontier operator models under a fixed-attack paired-replay protocol, we find that adaptive multi-turn attacks reliably push the operator team past a safety limit: across the four models, between 8.7% and 12.1% of attack sessions end with the plant losing a critical safety function. Although the four models look almost equally robust by this aggregate rate, their failures barely overlap: of $149$ sessions, none defeat all four models while a third defeat at least one, so vulnerabilities are nearly disjoint across models rather than nested. The effect of added defences is strongly model-dependent: the same guardrail stack or safety-advisor agent that lowers attack success for one model can raise it for another. We release the simulation venue, attack dataset, and replay tooling for reproducible safety evaluation of LLM agents.

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

Robust $Q$-learning for mean-field control under Wasserstein uncertainty in common noise

arXiv:2606.20356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this article, we present a robust $Q$-learning algorithm for discrete-time mean-field control problems under Wasserstein uncertainty in the common noise law. The algorithm combines a quantization-and-projection scheme with a Wasserstein dual reformulation on the common-noise space. We establish its convergence together with finite-time iteration bounds for both synchronous and asynchronous learning schemes. Numerical experiments on systemic risk and epidemic models compare the asynchronous implementation with an idealized Bellman iteration, illustrate the robustness-performance tradeoff under common-noise misspecification, and report the observed convergence behavior of the asynchronous $Q$-learning algorithm.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Blended Chart Surfaces: A Seamless Explicit Representation for Smooth Surface Fitting

A surface representation suitable for geometry processing should be compact and explicit, provide global smoothness guarantees, support a wide range of surface topologies, and offer reliable access to differential quantities such as normals and surface energies, while remaining compatible with modern differentiable optimization. Existing neural representations typically sacrifice one or more of these properties: implicit fields typically require iso-surfacing for downstream use, while explicit neural maps are constrained by canonical-domain parametrizations or exhibit seam artifacts between local charts. We introduce Blended Chart Surfaces, a compact, network-free, explicit representation that is smooth by construction and anchored to user-provided topology. Given a coarse proxy mesh encoding the intended surface topology and approximate geometry, Blended Chart Surfaces jointly optimize for a polynomial map at each proxy vertex using an off-the-shelf optimizer to fit to an implicit target shape, avoiding the need for an input parametrization. Neighboring maps are fused using a smooth 'one-ring coordinate' blending scheme, decoupling topology and coarse geometry (carried by the proxy) from geometric details (carried by the local patches). The surface is globally smooth, fully differentiable, and enables stable evaluation of derivatives, making differential quantities and surface energies directly accessible. Additionally, our construction is equivariant to rigid motions and scaling of the proxy mesh. We evaluate Blended Chart Surfaces on various topologies and geometric complexity, and compare against explicit alternatives including interpolating-function baselines and mesh-displacement MLPs. Across these, Blended Chart Surfaces achieve a favorable trade-off among compactness, simplicity, access to differential quantities, and expressivity while remaining smooth across patch boundaries.

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

Learning-Infused Formal Reasoning: From Contract Synthesis to Artifact Reuse and Formal Semantics

arXiv:2602.02881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper articulates a long-term research vision for formal methods at the intersection with artificial intelligence, outlining multiple conceptual and technical dimensions and reporting on our ongoing work toward realising this vision. It advances a forward-looking perspective on the next generation of formal methods based on the integration of automated contract synthesis, semantic artifact reuse, and refinement-based theory. We argue that future verification systems must builds towards individual correctness proofs toward a cumulative, knowledge-driven paradigm in which specifications, contracts, and proofs are continuously synthesised and transferred across systems. To support this shift, we outline a hybrid framework combining large language models with graph-based representations to enable scalable semantic matching and principled reuse of verification artifacts. Learning-based components provide semantic guidance across heterogeneous notations and abstraction levels, while symbolic matching ensures formal soundness. Grounded in compositional reasoning, this vision points toward verification ecosystems that evolve systematically, leveraging past verification efforts to accelerate future assurance.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gen Z scepticism towards AI is a wake-up call — universities must take it seriously

Authors:

The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust. The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust.

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

Robust State-Conditional Feature-Weighted Jump Models for Temporal Clustering

arXiv:2606.13146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a robust feature-weighted jump model for time-dependent clustering. A penalty is used to encourage smoothness of transitions over time, while robustness is achieved through the use of a Tukey's biweight loss function. An additional parameter controls the variability of feature weights across states, allowing the model to assign state-specific relevance to each feature. We illustrate in simulation how the method accurately recovers the true cluster sequence and reliably identifies relevant features, outperforming competing approaches, particularly in the presence of outliers. We conclude with two empirical applications, one on the number of conflict-related homicides in Kosovo in the period 1998-2000, and another on macroeconomic performance of twelve European countries in the period 1949-2024.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

When batch correction corrupts gene expression: uncovering distortions in correlation structures

Batch correction is essential for integrating datasets and enabling population-level insights into health and disease. Embedding-based approaches are among the most widely used solutions, but here we highlight a critical, overlooked limitation: these methods can distort feature-to-feature (e.g., gene gene) relationships, potentially undermining downstream analyses. We investigate this issue and introduce a novel metric to quantify it.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Faithfulness Gap: Certifying Semantic Equivalence Between Natural-Language and Formal Mathematical Statements

arXiv:2606.16541v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoformalization, translating natural-language mathematics into formal proof assistants, is bottlenecked not by translation fluency but by faithfulness: a formal statement can typecheck and be provable, yet still encode a different theorem than the source intended. We introduce Bidirectional Provability Fingerprinting (\bpf{}), a framework that certifies faithfulness by characterizing each candidate through its forward and backward consequence neighborhoods in the ambient theory and matching these against probes derived from the natural-language statement. We further introduce four novel components: (i) Counterfactual Probe Generation (\cpg{}), a contrastive procedure that synthesizes probes targeting specific drift directions; (ii) the Equivalence Spectrum, a continuous faithfulness score that replaces brittle binary verdicts; (iii) Adaptive Probe Budget Allocation (\apba{}), an information-theoretic budget router; and (iv) Faithfulness-Guided Decoding (\fgd{}), which uses \bpf{} signals as a reward during autoformalization. We prove a drift detection theorem and a PAC-faithfulness result establishing that the equivalence class of a natural language statement is learnable from $\mathcal{O}(\log(1/\delta)/\varepsilon)$ probes under mild assumptions. We release \driftbench{}, a benchmark of $2{,}183$ NL/Lean~4 pairs with controlled drift labels across six subfields of mathlib4. \bpf{}\,+\,\cpg{} detects $89.6\%$ of drifted formalizations at a $3.0\%$ false-positive rate-against $41.2\%$ for typecheck and $63.3\%$ for LLM-judge baselines, and \fgd{} reduces the rate at which a state-of-the-art autoformalizer emits drifted statements by $47\%$. https://pmlrbd.github.io/BPF/

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

Descriptive versus Regulatory Uncertainty in Bounded Predictive Systems

arXiv:2605.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Any system that models the world under finite representational capacity must compress; any compression entails a prior; and the prior is the system's bias. What has not been established is whether uncertainty participates in the dynamics governing future behavior, or merely describes the output distribution without consequence. We introduce a structural distinction between descriptive uncertainty, which does not recursively modulate the system's policy, and regulatory uncertainty, which directly enters the optimization landscape and drives persistent adaptive restructuring. We prove formally that current transformer architectures are confined to descriptive uncertainty at inference. We ground this in thermodynamics via Landauer's principle: for uncertainty to be regulatory, epistemic error must cost real energy; in a decoupled system, hallucinations and correct derivations dissipate identical energy. We test this empirically across three locally-deployed language models (3B, 8B, 70B parameters). Token-level Shannon entropy is statistically invariant across tasks spanning pattern retrieval, causal operator application, and out-of-distribution causal generalization in all three models (all pairwise p >= 0.568; within-model ranges 0.011-0.028 nats), while task accuracy varies substantially across the same conditions (0%-100%). Entropy and accuracy are orthogonal. The decoupling is scale-invariant: larger models achieve higher accuracy but identical entropy flatness. This structural incapacity is not resolvable by additional parameters or training data. Genuine epistemic grounding requires physical coupling between thermodynamic substrate state and information processing cost.

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

ARGUS: Stacked Multi-View Identity Mosaic Injection for Subject-Preserving Video Generation

Subject-preserving video generation is not solved by frontal-face similarity alone: a generated person must remain recognizable across motion, large viewpoint changes, expression shifts, occlusion, scale variation, and conflicts among text, first-frame, and identity references. We argue that the central bottleneck is the point-reference paradigm, which collapses identity into a single static observation entangled with pose, accessories, lighting, background, and camera statistics. We introduce Argus, a Wan-based framework centered on Stacked Multi-View Identity Mosaic Injection (SMII). SMII converts MLLM-selected image/video identity evidence into a 3*3 stacked mosaic, synchronizes the mosaic with the current diffusion time, and injects it as negative-time read-only memory in Wan's native token space. This turns identity from an external clean adapter or a single reference image into a compact dynamic distribution. Around SMII, an MLLM Identity Director selects informative identity moments and resolves condition conflicts, while no-cross-pair counterfactual training, Temporal Identity Annealing, and Adaptive Self-Likeness Guidance improve robustness without paired subject-video supervision. We further release HardID-Celeb, a public-figure identity-stress benchmark, and introduce YawScore and OccScore to probe large-yaw and first-frame-occlusion robustness. Argus achieves state-of-the-art results on OpenS2V-Eval Human-Domain, reaching 64.38 Total Score, 71.86 FaceSim, 51.62 NexusScore, and 79.14 NaturalScore. On HardID-Celeb, Argus obtains 76.80 FaceSim and improves YawScore and OccScore by 12.60 and 15.10 points over the strongest baselines, demonstrating that dynamic identity memory and large-scale counterfactual self-supervision are highly effective for subject-preserving video generation.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

Stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active conformational transition of NLRP3 monomer

Authors:

by Jin Peng, Wenjian Li, Hao Wang, Xiaohui Chen, Manjie Zhang, Bin Sun The NLRP3 inflammasome is a multiprotein complex that primes cytokine production in the innate immune system. The inflammasome activation involves the cage-to-disk transition of NLRP3 oligomers, facilitated by the co-factor NEK7 protein. While NEK7’s role in promoting cage disassembly has been reported, its involvement in the large conformational changes of the NLRP3 monomer during activation remains elusive. Here, by using multi-scale simulations, we uncovered a stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active transition. In the early stage, NEK7 reshapes the dynamics of the highly unstable inactive NLRP3 monomer to resemble active state, priming the conformational transition. In the middle stage, NEK7 impedes progression by populating an intermediate state farther from the active conformation than the NEK7-free counterpart, and structures in this state exhibit reduced allosteric potential toward activation. In the late stage, NEK7 has negligible impact, as the active conformation remains inherently isolated by a high energy barrier regardless of NEK7 presence. This highlights the critical role of oligomeric assembly in enabling monomeric NLRP3 to complete its conformational transition, in agreement with experiment observations. Our work suggests a multilayered activation mechanism where oligomer-level assembly and monomeric conformational changes are coupled, providing new mechanistic insights into this physiologically essential macromolecular process.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

OmniVideo-100K: A Dataset for Audio-Visual Reasoning through Structured Scripts and Evidence Chains

Current automated pipelines for audio-visual Question Answering (QA) generally adopt a ``video-caption-QA'' paradigm. However, these methods typically segment videos into short clips and generate separate descriptions for audio and visual modalities. This decoupled processing severs inherent associations between sounds and their visual sources, while independent clip processing often causes inconsistent descriptions of the same entity across segments. Furthermore, coupling long-text comprehension and QA synthesis into a single step often restricts models to localized events, yielding questions lacking long-term temporal connections and deep cross-modal reasoning. To address these issues, we propose an automated data engine featuring two mechanisms: (1) Entity-Anchored Video Scripting transforms videos into structured scripts, comprising summaries, main entity lists, and segment-wise audio-visual descriptions. The entity list serves as a global prior to ensure cross-segment referential consistency and reconstruct audio-visual associations. (2) Clue-Guided QA Generation prompts models to first mine cross-segment, multimodal clues from the script, and subsequently generate QA pairs based on these high-value clues. Leveraging this pipeline, we construct the instruction-tuning dataset OmniVideo-100K and a human-verified test set, OmniVideo-Test. Fine-tuning VITA-1.5, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B and Qwen3-Omni-30B on OmniVideo-100K yields performance gains of up to 20.59% on OmniVideo-Test, demonstrating strong generalization (up to 12.64% improvements) across established benchmarks like Daily-Omni and JointAVBench.