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) 2026-06-19

ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World

arXiv:2606.19980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving dexterous robotic manipulation in the real world heavily relies on human supervision and algorithm engineering, which becomes a central bottleneck in the pursuit of general physical intelligence. Although emerging coding agents can generate code to automate algorithm search, their successes remain largely confined in digital environments. We conjecture that the missing abstraction to automate robotics research is a repeatable feedback loop for real-world policy improvement: reset the scene, execute a policy, verify the outcome, and refine the next iteration. To bridge this gap, we introduce ENPIRE, a harness framework for coding agents that instantiates this physical feedback routine with four core modules: an Environment module (EN) for automatic reset and verification, a Policy Improvement module (PI) that launches policy refinement, a Rollout module (R) to evaluate policies with one or multiple physical robots operating in parallel, and an Evolution module (E) in which coding agents analyze logs, consult literature, improve training infrastructure and algorithm code to address failure modes. This closed-loop system transforms real-world manipulation learning into a controllable optimization procedure, minimizing human effort while allowing fair ablations across training recipe and agent variants. Powered by ENPIRE, frontier coding agents can autonomously train a policy to achieve a 99% success rate on challenging, dexterous manipulation tasks, such as organizing a pin box, fastening a zip tie, and tool use, a process that further accelerates when we dispatch an agent team on a robot fleet. Our results suggest a practical and scalable path toward deploying coding agents to autonomously advancing robotics in the physical world.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A DeepLearning Framework for Dynamic Estimation of Origin-Destination Sequence

arXiv:2307.05623v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: OD matrix estimation is a critical problem in the transportation domain. The principle method uses the traffic sensor measured information such as traffic counts to estimate the traffic demand represented by the OD matrix. The problem is divided into two categories: static OD matrix estimation and dynamic OD matrices sequence(OD sequence for short) estimation. The above two face the underdetermination problem caused by abundant estimated parameters and insufficient constraint information. In addition, OD sequence estimation also faces the lag challenge: due to different traffic conditions such as congestion, identical vehicle will appear on different road sections during the same observation period, resulting in identical OD demands correspond to different trips. To this end, this paper proposes an integrated method, which uses deep learning methods to infer the structure of OD sequence and uses structural constraints to guide traditional numerical optimization. Our experiments show that the neural network(NN) can effectively infer the structure of the OD sequence and provide practical constraints for numerical optimization to obtain better results. Moreover, the experiments show that provided structural information contains not only constraints on the spatial structure of OD matrices but also provides constraints on the temporal structure of OD sequence, which solve the effect of the lagging problem well.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

TCHG: Tri-Trust Conditioned Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Reliable Dynamic Trust Prediction

arXiv:2606.16611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trust prediction infers latent user-user trust relations and provides important support for social recommendation, fake-review and manipulation detection, and risk identification. Graph neural networks have become a prominent approach to trust prediction because of their ability to learn network structures and complex trust dependencies. However, existing methods often rely on a unified representation of trust signals and do not disentangle heterogeneous trust evidence into separate evidence channels, failing to exploit the distinct roles that different evidence channels should play during trust modeling. To address this gap, this paper argues that trust evidence should not be treated as an undifferentiated input, but should be decomposed and used as functional control factors over graph propagation. We propose TCHG, a tri-trust conditioned heterogeneous graph learning framework that decomposes trust evidence into three channels and assigns them distinct functional roles in propagation: entity reliability governs message admission, interaction-behavior reliability modulates propagation strength, and contextual trust adjusts the propagation mode through context-conditioned operator selection. Since the three evidence channels evolve at different temporal scales, TCHG maintains independent temporal states with non-uniform decay rates to prevent rapidly changing contextual signals from overwriting slowly accumulated entity reliability. It further predicts trust probability and calibrates the output probability, improving predictive confidence under sparse or conflicting evidence. Extensive experiments on multiple public trust datasets show that TCHG achieves effective and reliable trust prediction compared with representative trust prediction and heterogeneous graph baselines.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Reference Fields Transformations in Linearized Quantum Gravity

arXiv:2606.09344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffeomorphism invariance is a central feature of general relativity. Without external reference structures, matter and geometry must be specified relationally, with respect to internal subsystems serving as reference frames. In quantum gravity, these reference systems must themselves be treated as quantum, motivating the use of quantum reference frames. In this work, we address how such a relational description could be formulated within linearized quantum gravity. To this purpose, we introduce quantum reference fields, i.e. sets of four dynamical scalar fields whose stress-energy tensors enter the gravitational constraints. These fields extend the notion of quantum reference frames to local field-theoretic reference systems, allowing matter and gravitational degrees of freedom to be described relationally with respect to physical quantum systems. By generalizing the perspective-neutral construction of quantum reference frames, we show that relational, gauge invariant observables admit reduced descriptions in the perspective of each quantum reference field, and we derive the unitary transformations relating them. The resulting unitary maps implement local quantum coordinate changes between different internal perspectives, and act on the linearized gravitational field with an analogous structure to a linearized diffeomorphism, but with the classical gauge parameter replaced by a physical quantum field. Finally, we construct a relational von Neumann-type measurement scheme, showing how the corresponding reduced observables can be accessed operationally from the perspective of a quantum reference field.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Cross-Domain Multi-Person Human Activity Recognition via Near-Field Wi-Fi Sensing

Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition (HAR) provides substantial convenience and has emerged as a thriving research field, yet the coarse spatial resolution inherent to Wi-Fi significantly hinders its ability to distinguish multiple subjects. By exploiting the near-field domination effect, establishing a dedicated sensing link for each subject through their personal Wi-Fi device offers a promising solution for multi-person HAR under native traffic. However, due to the subject-specific characteristics and irregular patterns of near-field signals, HAR neural network models require fine-tuning (FT) for cross-domain adaptation, which becomes particularly challenging with certain categories unavailable. In this paper, we propose WiAnchor, a novel training framework for efficient cross-domain adaptation in the presence of incomplete activity categories. This framework processes Wi-Fi signals embedded with irregular time information in three steps: during pre-training, we enlarge inter-class feature margins to enhance the separability of activities; in the FT stage, we innovate an anchor matching mechanism for cross-domain adaptation, filtering subject-specific interference informed by incomplete activity categories, rather than attempting to extract complete features from them; finally, the recognition of input samples is further improved based on their feature-level similarity with anchors. We construct a comprehensive dataset to thoroughly evaluate WiAnchor, achieving over 90% cross-domain accuracy with absent activity categories.

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

Delayed acceptance sampling with Hamiltonian proposal subchains for random field materials inference

arXiv:2606.14743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper focuses on accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling in Bayesian inverse problems in which forward model evaluations dominate the computational cost. It builds on several established ingredients previously used in related scenarios: delayed acceptance, neural network surrogate models, Hamiltonian proposals, and proposal subchains. The main framework is the delayed-acceptance Metropolis-Hastings algorithm of Christen and Fox (2005). The first-stage proposal distribution is constructed from a subchain of Hamiltonian trajectories targeting the surrogate posterior. For each fixed surrogate model, the Hamiltonian subchain and delayed-acceptance correction define a kernel invariant with respect to the exact posterior. In the present work, the surrogate is updated only during a burn-in phase, after which the production run uses a fixed surrogate model. The sampling framework is implemented in Python using parallel processes. Several chains are generated in parallel and share a single surrogate model trained during burn-in on all collected data. The forward model is treated as a black box; therefore, the application area is broad. However, the main motivation is efficient solution of geotechnical inverse problems with material properties represented by Gaussian random fields. In this study, the sampling framework is applied to a geotechnical inverse problem in which hydraulic conductivity and porosity are modeled as non-stationary Gaussian random fields approximated using truncated Karhunen-Loeve expansions. Based on a precomputation, the truncation dimensions are chosen separately for hydraulic conductivity and porosity. The forward model outputs are pore pressure values at control points and selected observation times. These are compared with in situ pore pressure measurements collected over one year during the Tunnel Sealing Experiment in an underground laboratory in Canada.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Evaluating Prompting-Based Defenses Against Domain-Camouflaged Injection Attacks

Authors:

Domain-camouflaged injection attacks embed malicious instructions in retrieved content using domain-appropriate vocabulary, evading standard detectors that rely on syntactic injection markers. When detection fails, practitioners need to know which defense architectures reduce attack success. We evaluate five prompting-based defenses (spotlighting, paraphrasing, prompt sandwiching, and two combinations) against domain-camouflaged injection across three model families (Claude Haiku, Llama 3.1 8B, Gemini 2.0 Flash) and three deployment domains (financial, legal, general) using 3,510 trials. Paraphrasing retrieved content before agent processing is the most consistently effective defense in this benchmark, reducing camouflage attack success rate by 55-84\% depending on model, and achieves lower attack success rates than our Llama Guard 4 configuration on every model tested. Defense effectiveness is strongly model-dependent: spotlighting halves attack success on Claude Haiku but provides no benefit on Llama 3.1 8B. Financial domain deployments face the highest residual risk at 26-33\% baseline attack success rate, with no prompting-based defense fully eliminating the threat on weaker models. These results provide the first systematic evaluation of prompting-based defenses specifically against camouflage-class injection attacks and establish benchmark-based recommendations for practitioners. All tasks use synthetically constructed professional documents; whether these benchmark rankings generalize to real enterprise documents remains an open question.

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

LLMs on Tabular Data with Limited Semantics: Evidence from Industrial Car Retrofit Prediction

arXiv:2606.15314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Industrial retrofit planning depends on structured operational data rather than free text: planners must estimate whether a newly registered prototype will require a retrofit, which retrofit package it will need, and how long the work will take. We study an industrial dataset linking a prototype-registration system (284,271 vehicles) with a retrofit-management system (48,716 cleaned visits), and compare strong tabular machine learning baselines with three LLM-based strategies on row-serialized inputs: embedding features (Amazon Titan), direct prompted classification (Claude Sonnet 4), and an ML+LLM stacking approach. Across binary occurrence prediction, 15-way retrofit-type classification, per-visit duration regression, and an aggregated monthly benchmark, classical tree ensembles remain the strongest standalone models. However, the LLM results reveal a consistent pattern: embeddings remain useful on tables (binary AUC = 0.982), direct prompting collapses once semantic signal is stripped by hashing (binary AUC = 0.500; multiclass weighted F1 = 0.018), and hybrid stacking yields the best manually built multiclass model (weighted F1 = 0.626). On the monthly benchmark, lag-based machine learning outperforms time-series foundation models, though Chronos-small remains competitive in zero-shot forecasting. The results suggest that on privacy-constrained industrial tables, LLMs are more effective as complementary components than as replacements for strong tabular baselines.

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

DiffAttn: Diffusion-Based Drivers' Visual Attention Prediction with LLM-Enhanced Semantic Reasoning

Drivers' visual attention provides critical cues for anticipating latent hazards and directly shapes decision-making and control maneuvers, where its absence can compromise traffic safety. To emulate drivers' perception patterns and advance visual attention prediction for intelligent vehicles, we propose DiffAttn, a diffusion-based framework that formulates this task as a conditional diffusion-denoising process, enabling more accurate modeling of drivers' attention. To capture both local and global scene features, we adopt Swin Transformer as encoder and design a decoder that combines a Feature Fusion Pyramid for cross-layer interaction with dense, multi-scale conditional diffusion to jointly enhance denoising learning and model fine-grained local and global scene contexts. Additionally, a large language model (LLM) layer is incorporated to enhance top-down semantic reasoning and improve sensitivity to safety-critical cues. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that DiffAttn achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance, surpassing most video-based, top-down-feature-driven, and LLM-enhanced baselines. Our framework further supports interpretable driver-centric scene understanding and has the potential to improve in-cabin human-machine interaction, risk perception, and drivers' state measurement in intelligent vehicles.

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

Conflict-Aware Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts

arXiv:2606.15625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The continuous scaling of large language models (LLMs) incurs prohibitive computational costs, making Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) a scalable alternative for efficient fine-tuning via sparse activation. While federated learning (FL) emerges as the paradigm for privacy-preserving collaborative optimization, integrating MoE into FL under data heterogeneity may trigger conflicting expert optimizations. Client-specific data distributions force same-indexed experts to optimize under inconsistent or even conflicting feature-label correlations. This mismatch induces destructive interference during aggregation, thus destabilizing the optimization trajectory and degrading model performance. To address this issue, we propose FC-MoE, a federated conflict-aware framework for MoE fine-tuning. It employs an importance aware weighting scheme to prioritize reliable local updates and utilizes gradient consensus projection to suppress conflicting updates, ensuring a stable global optimization path. Moreover, a local knowledge retention mechanism further preserves specialized client expertise by re-anchoring domain-specific residuals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FC-MoE accelerates convergence and enhances both global and local model performance in non-IID federated environments.

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

Allure of Craquelure: A Variational-Generative Approach to Crack Detection in Paintings

Recent advances in imaging technologies, deep learning and numerical performance have enabled non-invasive detailed analysis of artworks, supporting their documentation and conservation. In particular, automated detection of craquelure in digitized paintings is crucial for assessing degradation and guiding restoration, yet remains challenging due to the possibly complex scenery and the visual similarity between cracks and crack-like artistic features such as brush strokes or hair. We propose a hybrid approach that models crack detection as an inverse problem, decomposing an observed image into a crack-free painting and a crack component. A deep generative model is employed as powerful prior for the underlying artwork, while crack structures are captured using a Mumford–Shah-type variational functional together with a crack prior. Joint optimization yields a pixel-level map of crack localizations in the painting.

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

Discrete Autoregressive Transformer for Generative Mechanism Synthesis

arXiv:2606.17409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Planar path synthesis requires mechanisms whose coupler curves match a prescribed trajectory; the mapping from curve to linkage is inherently one-to-many across four-, six-, and eight-bar topologies. We address this design problem with simulation-grounded evaluation on a curated corpus of over one million mechanisms, reporting Chamfer distance and dynamic time warping after forward kinematics and geometric alignment. We formulate synthesis as conditional autoregressive sequence modeling: joint coordinates are uniformly quantized to tokens and generated by a decoder-only transformer with a variational-autoencoder (VAE) latent of the target curve and an explicit mechanism-type token. Training combines token cross-entropy with a Gaussian-smoothed bin auxiliary loss that respects ordinal structure among bins. At inference, a bounded latent-noise schedule decodes all mechanism types at each noise level; we retain the top five candidates by geometric error, yielding diverse accurate families without dataset lookup. On held-out tests, aggregate mean Chamfer distance is $0.0132$ and mean dynamic time warping is $0.153$; a latent $k$-nearest-neighbor baseline that conditions on training-set neighbor latents in VAE space achieves matched-topology mean Chamfer distance $0.0071$ and mean dynamic time warping $0.117$ using the same decoder.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Lost in a Single Vector: Improving Long-Document Retrieval with Chunk Evidence Aggregation

Dense retrieval ranks one query vector against one document vector. On long documents, this interface can fail when a short but decisive span is weakened during document encoding before ranking. We study this failure mode as document-side early compression and introduce the Evidence Dilution Index (EDI) to measure how far a document-level representation falls below the strongest chunk-level evidence within the same gold document. Guided by this view, we propose DICE (Document Inference via Chunk Evidence), a training-free document-side strategy that splits documents into chunks, encodes them independently with a frozen model, and aggregates them back into a single vector while preserving the standard one-query-one-document interface. On LongEmbed, DICE improves retrieval across four backbones, with the largest gains on slices beyond 4k tokens: for Dream, Passkey >4k rises from 30.0 to 90.0 and Needle >4k from 23.3 to 74.0. Across 12,779 filtered samples, DICE yields lower EDI than the single-vector baseline in 92.8% of cases. These results establish document-level encoding as a practical and underexplored lever for long-document retrieval.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Energy-Modulated Time-Asymmetric Spontaneous Collapse: Forward-Backward Dynamics from Stochastic Ito Reversal and Bright Solitons

arXiv:2606.06452v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a rigorous theoretical framework for symmetry breaking and quantum irreversibility arising from stochastic Ito field reversal within a cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrodinger equation (CQ-NLSE) formalism. Starting from three physically motivated considerations, forward and backward nonlinear stochastic differential equations are derived via the Ito calculus. Kinematic time-reversal is shown to be fundamentally incompatible with the Ito stochastic structure, yielding the universal asymmetry-coupling parameter of 2/3. An energy-driven collapse operator proportional to the product of noise strength, local probability density, and excitation energy squared is introduced, amplifying the collapse in high-density, high-excitation regions. Exactly bright soliton solutions are obtained for a quasi-one-dimensional BEC of attractive Li-7 atoms, with forward and backward amplitude ratio of 1.870. Heat map analysis of the parameter planes reveals that the forward collapse operator grows monotonically in time while the backward counterpart decays, achieving a ratio approximately 1030, sharply distinguishing this framework from conventional symmetric collapse models.

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

ChLogic: Evaluating Robustness of Logical Reasoning in Chinese Expressions

Large language models perform increasingly well on standardized logical reasoning benchmarks, but whether this ability remains robust beyond English is unclear. We introduce ChLogic, an English–Chinese aligned benchmark that tests whether models preserve logical reasoning performance when the same latent logical structure is expressed in English and diverse Chinese surface realizations. Built from formal logical templates, the benchmark contains three data sets: (i) the General aligned set, derived from 60 General Propositions across nine template families; (ii) the Difficult aligned set, derived from 40 Difficult Problems; and (iii) the Chinese-only set, covering 15 language-specific phenomenon types. Each aligned item pairs one English reference expression with five Chinese realizations. Experiments on Qwen3, Ministral, and GLM models reveal a persistent English–Chinese performance gap. Back-translation from standard Chinese into English often improves performance on the General aligned set, but produces mixed effects on the Difficult aligned set, where Qwen3-32B and GLM-5.1 perform worse after translation. These results indicate that Chinese surface realization, translation artifacts, and model-specific behavior jointly affect multilingual logical reasoning. Overall, ChLogic provides a useful stress test for the robustness of multilingual reasoning.

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

Agents-K1: Towards Agent-native Knowledge Orchestration

arXiv:2606.13669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current LLM-based research agents have advanced through agent orchestration, yet largely overlook scientific knowledge orchestration. Existing works often reduce papers to abstracts, surface mentions, and flat \texttt{cites} edges, omitting key entities, claims, evidence, mechanisms, and method lineages essential for scientific reasoning. To this end, we introduce Agents-K1, an end-to-end knowledge orchestration pipeline that converts raw documents into agent-native scientific knowledge graphs. Agents-K1 integrates three components under a unifying theoretical foundation: a multimodal parser whose five-module schema captures entities, multimodal evidence, citations, and typed inter-entity relations across the full paper rather than abstracts alone; a 4B information-extraction backbone trained with GRPO under a rule-based reward; and a graphanything CLI, a tri-source agent interface that unifies web search, multimodal graph retrieval, and cross-document traversal. On top of this, we process 2.46 million scientific papers across six subjects to produce Scholar-KG, of which we release a one-million-paper subset, and the full Scholar-KG is accessible via the SCP link below. The same pipeline can be extended to general-domain corpora and to schema-conformant data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Agents-K1 achieves superior performance in scientific information extraction, knowledge graph construction, and multi-hop scientific reasoning.

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

Cavity method for permutation models on Cayley trees

arXiv:2606.17751v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivated by permutation statistical models arising in random tensor networks, we study permutation models on a Cayley tree whose variables take values in the symmetric group $\Sn$. The pair interaction is assumed to depend only on the cycle type of the relative permutation. Then the Boltzmann weight is written as a class function on $\Sn$. This property diagonalizes the edge convolution operator in irreducible representation sectors. As a result, the linear stability of the uniform paramagnetic cavity solution is controlled by the character eigenvalue ratios. For cycle-factorized weights, these eigenvalues can be expressed as specializations of Schur functions. We derive the instability criteria and also verify their validity by comparison with direct numerical iterations of the cavity equation.

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

Planning with the Views via Scene Self-Exploration

Can VLMs predict how each camera move changes the view, and plan many such moves ahead? We call this capability view planning, requiring (1)understanding how a single action transforms the view, and (2)composing many such transformations across multi-turn plans to identify a target view. We probe both abilities in our proposed ViewSuite, a 3D point-cloud environment on real ScanNet scenes. Across 13 frontier VLMs, a critical planning gap emerges: they possess basic view-action knowledge but fail to compose it across multi-turn plans, with the gap widening as viewpoint distance grows. To close this gap, we propose an iterative framework that alternates self-exploration with view graph distillation. The key insight is that all exploration trajectories, regardless of their outcome, collectively form a view graph that compactly captures how viewpoints connect across a scene. Distilling this graph into diverse supervised tasks reshapes the policy distribution and overcomes the sparse rewards that stall pure RL. This improves Qwen2.5-VL-7B from 2.5% to 47.8% on interactive view planning, surpassing GPT-5.4 Pro (18.5%) and Gemini 3.1 Pro (21.4%). Self-exploration emerges as a promising path toward VLMs that can actively reason and plan in 3D space. Code and Data are at https://viewsuite.github.io.

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

When the Tool Decides: LLM Agents Defer Blindly to Graph Neural Network Tools, and Stronger Backbones Defer More

arXiv:2606.14476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A growing line of work equips large language model (LLM) agents with graph neural networks (GNNs) as callable tools, assuming the agent exercises judgment over when and how much to rely on such a tool. We test this directly. We expose a frozen GNN to a ReAct-style LLM agent as an explicit tool and measure, on node classification over a text-attributed graph (ogbn-arxiv, replicated on WikiCS), whether the agent uses the tool or merely obeys it. We find the agent does not exercise judgment: its predictions agree with the raw GNN's 97.6-99.2% of the time (5 seeds), collapsing into a GNN parrot that adopts the tool's output wholesale and bypasses its own reasoning. Sweeping backbone capability (Qwen2.5 0.5B-7B), the deference is not a weak-model artifact: among models able to invoke the tool, agreement rises with capability (0.60 to 0.98 from 1.5B to 7B). Crucially, the cost of deference does not shrink as capability grows and grows where alternatives emerge: a per-node oracle over the available actions beats the parrot by 0.09-0.18 at 3B and 0.12-0.22 at 7B, roughly doubling at high homophily, because the parrot is pinned to the frozen GNN while the agent's alternatives improve; at 7B a simple neighbour-label tool overtakes the GNN at high homophily (0.81 vs 0.71) yet the agent still defers. A simple selective-invocation gate recovers about half of that high-homophily gap (0.71 to 0.83) but yields no net global gain, and held-out estimates bound the best achievable gate over standard test-time features to at most a third of the oracle headroom: reliable selective invocation looks limited by available information, not merely router design. Our results are a cautionary measurement: evaluations of agent+tool systems cannot assume the agent adds judgment on top of the tool, and selective invocation must be designed in rather than expected to emerge from scale.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Frequency-dependent cognitive effects of Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) improves levodopa-induced motor complications and cardinal motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), but stimulation frequency may differentially shape outcomes. This is evident for axial and gait symptoms, which may respond differently to lower-frequency stimulation. Whether frequency-dependent effects extend to cognition remains unclear. Objective: To investigate the cognitive effects of DBS at distinct frequencies in PD. Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis (PROSPERO - CRD42024618253). PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE were searched for studies assessing cognitive outcomes under different stimulation frequencies. Eight cognitive domains were defined: verbal fluency, cognitive flexibility, executive control, working memory, attention, processing speed, episodic memory, and time processing. Multilevel random-effects meta-analyses were performed, with effect sizes expressed as Hedges' g. Results: Forty-three studies met the inclusion criteria, the majority (n = 31) involving STN-DBS. Twenty-one STN-DBS studies, including 355 patients, were included in the meta-analysis. Compared with HFS ([≥] 130 Hz), lower frequencies (4-80 Hz) were associated with better verbal fluency (g = 0.27) and cognitive flexibility (g = 0.38), with consistent effects across sensitivity and leave-one-out analyses. Accuracy-based executive control measures also favored lower-frequency stimulation. OFF-stimulation comparisons showed a concordant pattern. Evidence for other targets (PPN and NBM) was limited. Conclusions: Lower-frequency STN-DBS was associated with modest benefits in specific cognitive domains compared with HFS. These findings highlight the need for future research to determine how frequency interacts with stimulation location and symptom-specific networks to shape cognitive and cognitive-motor outcomes in PD.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Using visual biofeedback to reduce step length error at fast walking speeds is feasible after stroke

Background and Purpose: Walking after stroke is often characterized by persistent biomechanical impairments and reduced walking capacity. While visual biofeedback can improve gait mechanics and fast walking can enhance capacity, it is unclear whether individuals post-stroke can effectively use biofeedback at higher walking speeds to address both deficits simultaneously. This study examined the effects of walking speed on the ability of participants with chronic stroke to reduce step length (SL) errors using visual biofeedback. Methods: Sixteen individuals with chronic stroke walked on a treadmill at slow, self-selected, and fast speeds with and without visual SL biofeedback. Absolute SL error relative to individualized targets was calculated for paretic and non-paretic limbs. Linear mixed-effects models with piecewise linear splines assessed the effects of speed, limb, and feedback condition. Post hoc comparisons were performed for significant interactions. Results: At lower speeds, increasing speed reduced SL error in both limbs (p < 0.001). At higher speeds, the effects of speed were dependent on limb and condition (p < 0.001). Paretic SL error increased with speed without feedback but remained stable with feedback (p < 0.001). Non-paretic SL error decreased with speed regardless of condition. SL error was greater in the paretic limb overall (p < 0.001). Discussion and Conclusions: Fast walking alone did not reduce paretic SL errors. Participants with chronic stroke can effectively use visual biofeedback to reduce paretic SL errors at higher speeds, supporting its integration into high-intensity gait training to simultaneously treat biomechanical impairments and walking capacity deficits after stroke.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

UMA-Split: unimodal aggregation for both English and Mandarin non-autoregressive speech recognition

This paper proposes a unimodal aggregation (UMA) based nonautoregressive model for both English and Mandarin speech recognition. The original UMA explicitly segments and aggregates acoustic frames (with unimodal weights that first monotonically increase and then decrease) of the same text token to learn better representations than regular connectionist temporal classification (CTC). However, it only works well in Mandarin. It struggles with other languages, such as English, for which a single syllable may be tokenized into multiple fine-grained tokens, or a token spans fewer than 3 acoustic frames and fails to form unimodal weights. To address this problem, we propose allowing each UMA-aggregated frame map to multiple tokens, via a simple split module that generates two tokens from each aggregated frame before computing the CTC loss.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Nothing from Something: Can a Language Model Discover 0?

AI systems based on artificial neural networks are being developed with aspirations of pushing the boundary of human mathematical knowledge. A key question for these systems is how much they can reach beyond their training data. Mathematical discovery requires a strong form of out of distribution generalization; the ability to hypothesize genuinely new - and potentially logically more powerful - mathematical structures. It has been hypothesized that language abilities support such generalizations in human cognition. In this work, we use simple arithmetic as a case study for examining how modern AI models could expand their mathematical horizons, evaluating whether these models can independently discover the concept of "zero". We show that We show that (1) language models of a GPT-2 size are unable to perform this generalization at test time regardless of language pretraining, but (2) models can improve substantially after training on tens or hundreds of examples of zero. Additionally, we find that language pretraining reduces the number of required examples by approximately $50\%$, showing that language abilities can scaffold mathematical discovery in neural models.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

Virus-human protein-protein interactions predict viral phenotypes

Viral phenotypes such as host and tissue tropism are critical determinants of viral infection and transmission. Inferring viral phenotypes presents unique challenges compared to cellular organisms, as viruses rely entirely on host machinery for replication and survival. Current methods for predicting viral phenotypes mainly rely on viral genomic data, often overlooking host-related information. Here, we evaluated the utility of predicted virus-human protein-protein interactions (PPIs) in inferring diverse viral phenotypes using machine-learning algorithms. For predicting human infectivity, a PPI-based machine learning model outperformed both virus genomic and protein sequence-based models that used large language model embeddings. It also surpassed previous methods that incorporated both viral and host genomic data. The human proteins identified by the model were significantly enriched in functions related to viral infection and immune response. In predicting various phenotypes of human RNA viruses, PPI-based models performed better than virus sequence-based models in forecasting virulence, human transmissibility and transmission routes, while showing comparable performance to genomic sequence-based models in predicting tissue tropism. Finally, we demonstrated that a PPI-based model could distinguish high-risk HPV genotypes from low-risk ones. Proteins associated with high-risk HPV were involved in apoptosis and immune regulation, whereas those linked to low-risk HPV were enriched in telomere maintenance and DNA repair. Collectively, this study is the first to demonstrate the value of predicted virus-human PPIs in inferring viral phenotypes, thereby enhancing our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying these phenotypes. It also provides effective tools for risk assessment of emerging viruses, contributing to improved pandemic preparedness.

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

Koshur Diacritizer: A Byte-Level Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Kashmiri Diacritic Restoration

Kashmiri, an Indo-Aryan language written in a modified Perso-Arabic script, frequently omits diacritic marks in digital text, creating ambiguity and challenging downstream NLP applications. We present Koshur Diacritizer, a ByT5-small byte-level sequence-to-sequence model for restoring diacritics in Kashmiri text. To support this task, we release a publicly available dataset of 23.7k aligned undiacritized diacritized Kashmiri sentence pairs. The proposed framework combines script-aware normalization, alignment validation, and skeleton-preserving inference to ensure reliable restoration while maintaining the original base-letter sequence. Experimental results on a held-out test set achieve a DERm of 0.2012 and a WER of 0.2159. Additionally, evaluation by a native Kashmiri linguistic expert yields a mean accuracy of 77.5%. The dataset, model, and source code are publicly released to provide a reproducible baseline for Kashmiri diacritic restoration and future low-resource language research.