中 EN
Sign In Register

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.

Sign In Register
01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

How knowledge shapes community stigma and social support for women seeking abortion in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A cross-sectional study.

Authors:
Etsou↗Kanda↗Ngwanza↗Mpoyi↗Bokamba↗Mulunda↗J.-C↗Lobo↗

Background The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) bears one of the highest maternal mortality ratios globally (746 per 100,000 live births), with nearly 11% of deaths attributable to complications of unsafe abortion. Despite ratification of the Maputo Protocol and related national policies, access to safe abortion remains limited, largely due to entrenched stigma. Social support, encompassing emotional, informational, and instrumental assistance, is critical in shaping womens abortion-seeking behaviors and health outcomes. This study examines the influence of community-level knowledge on stigma and social support for women seeking abortion care. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted from May 2024 to June 2024 among 1,715 adults in Kinshasa and North Kivu provinces. Analyses focused on a sub-sample of 574 respondents reporting familiarity with women who had undergone abortion. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was applied to estimate direct and indirect pathways linking community knowledge, stigma, and social support. Results Two core knowledge indicators, recognition of abortion as a safe medical procedure and awareness of legal conditions for access, were significantly associated with outcomes. A one-unit increase in knowledge corresponded to a 0.39-point increase in social support and a 0.19-point reduction in stigma. Enhanced knowledge promoted empathetic attitudes, reinforced practical support, and mitigated moralizing judgments toward women seeking abortion. Conclusions Strengthening community knowledge emerges as a strategic lever to reduce abortion-related stigma and enhance social support in the DRC. These findings underscore the importance of integrating stigma-reduction and knowledge-enhancement interventions into reproductive health programs to improve womens access to safe and dignified abortion care.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Unifying Acoustic Features and Text with Multimodal LLMs for Neurodegenerative Screening

Authors:
Qingfeng Zhang↗Yuanxiong Guo↗Yanmin Gong↗

arXiv:2606.14788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice-based screening offers a scalable and non-invasive way to assess neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD), but their staging remains challenging due to the difficulty of integrating heterogeneous data. This paper presents NeurMLLM, an efficient multimodal generative framework for neurodegenerative disease staging. NeurMLLM first encodes the spectrograms and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients of audio data with vision transformers and projects their representations into the embedding space of a large language model (LLM), where they are concatenated with transcript and demographic instruction tokens as a single unified sequence. The LLM is then instruction-tuned via Low-Rank Adaptation using task prompts to autoregressively predict a constrained label token, enabling a generative classification. By evaluating on the Bridge2AI-Voice dataset for fine-grained staging of AD and PD, we observe that NeurMLLM achieves strong performance, consistently outperforming classical machine learning methods and existing LLM-based approaches. The results show the high potential of multimodal LLMs in neurodegenerative disease staging, improving staging accuracy and supporting accessible deployment.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Edit3DGS: Unified Framework for Dynamic Head Editing via 2D Instruction-Guided Diffusion and 3D Gaussian Splatting

Authors:
Duy-Dat Tran↗Trung-Nghia Le↗

We present Edit3DGS, a unified framework for dynamic 3D head editing that integrates 2D instruction-guided diffusion with 3D Gaussian splatting. Unlike prior approaches that separately address frame-based edits or static 3D reconstruction, our method couples semantic controllability in the image domain with photorealistic, temporally consistent 3D representations. Given an input video, editable facial regions are masked and modified using a text-conditioned diffusion model to support fine-grained operations such as expression transformation, attribute modification, and appearance refinement. The edited frames are then aggregated through 3D Gaussian splatting to produce a coherent, high-fidelity avatar that preserves both identity and motion dynamics. To enforce consistency, Edit3DGS incorporates multi-view batch editing and lightweight inpainting strategies that recover lost expressions across timesteps. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables controllable, artifact-free head editing with smooth temporal transitions, offering practical applications in virtual avatars, immersive communication, film production, and interactive media.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

EvolveNav: Proactive Preflection and Self-Evolving Memory for Zero-Shot Object Goal Navigation

Authors:
Qi Chai↗Wenhao Shen↗Nanjie Yao↗Yue Xia↗Kaiyong Zhao↗Jie Ma↗Guosheng Lin↗Hao Wang↗

arXiv:2606.18235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation (ZS-OGN) requires embodied agents to explore and locate target objects without any prior training. To this end, recent methods leverage foundation models. But they typically rely on static priors and lack adaptation, which leads to repeated errors and costly trial and error. In this paper, we propose a self-evolving ZS-OGN framework that enables continuous test-time improvement. Specifically, we build an agentic rule memory by extracting actionable knowledge from past trajectories. Then, we propose a retrieval strategy based on upper confidence bound, selecting effective rules by balancing semantic relevance and historical success. In addition, we introduce a memory-guided preflection module that forecasts potential outcomes before action, reducing inefficient exploration. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing zero-shot baselines, achieving a 10.1\% improvement in success rate with fewer unnecessary steps.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

The Significance of Style Diversity in Annotation-Free Synthetic Data Generation

Authors:
Zahra Abbasiantaeb↗Zeno Belligoli↗Omar Essam↗Mohammad Aliannejadi↗

arXiv:2606.20400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generating high-utility synthetic data for intent classification typically requires human-annotated seed data, which is often unavailable in fast-paced industrial settings. In this paper, we propose a framework for synthetic dialogue generation that works entirely without human-annotated data, relying solely on intent definitions. Our proposed dialogue generation framework utilizes two different types of topic and style attributes to improve data diversity. Also, we propose two novel post-hoc stylization models called Univ and Exam to transform synthetic LLM-generated utterances into more varied, human-like linguistic styles. To enhance data quality, we utilize an LLM-as-a-judge filtering process. Experimental results on both industrial and public datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves up to 93.3% of the performance obtained using human-annotated training data. Crucially, the findings reveal that style diversity is more critical than topic diversity for synthetic data utility, as it prevents models from learning spurious stylistic correlations. Furthermore, the study shows that incorporating style attributes during the generation process is more effective than post-hoc style adaptation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Characterizing Brazilian Atlantic Forest Restoration Outcomes with Geospatial AlphaEarth Embeddings

Authors:
Alice Heiman↗

The Atlantic Forest in Brazil is a critical biodiversity hotspot, yet less than 12-15% of its original cover remains. Although monitoring forest restoration on a large scale is essential, traditional methods are limited by the impracticality of on-the-ground reporting on such a scale and by the saturation of remote-sensing indices such as NDVI. Furthermore, reforestation is a gradual process as opposed to the rapid spectral changes caused by deforestation. In this study, we examine 1,729 restoration sites in S\~ao Paulo, using satellite embeddings from the AlphaEarth Foundation's model to evaluate their effectiveness in characterising early restoration success. We introduce the concept of a 'Reference Trajectory Embedding', defining a metric of restoration success based on cosine similarity to reference sites of mature secondary forest. We observe distinct clusters in embedding space according to different land use and land cover (LULC) types, and we can identify sites with clear change vectors. However, the signal can be noisy, and embeddings may require further fine-tuning to capture and predict site metadata beyond LULC.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Opportunistic CKD Screening in Hospitalized Patients

Authors:
Segal↗Levy↗Ghosheh↗Wolak↗Ben-Dov↗

Background. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects 10-13% of adults worldwide but remains largely undiagnosed until advanced stages. Hospitalization provides an opportunity for early detection through opportunistic urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) measurement. Methods. We conducted a prospective three-arm study of opportunistic CKD screening in general internal medicine wards at Hadassah Mt. Scopus (MS), Hadassah Ein Kerem (EK), and Shaare Zedek Medical Center (SZMC) in Jerusalem (Protocol HMO-23-0300). Adult inpatients without known CKD or recent UACR were enrolled. Pathological UACR was defined as [≥]30 mg/g. Confirmed CKD required two pathological measurements [≥]90 days apart (KDIGO-compatible). eGFR was computed using the 2021 CKD-EPI race-free equation. Pooled proportions were estimated by fixed-effects logit meta-analysis; odds ratios by DerSimonian-Laird random-effects models. Results. A total of 158 patients were enrolled (MS n=50, EK n=57, SZMC n=51). Pathological first UACR was identified in 43/158 patients (27.2%; 95% CI 21.3-34.1%; I2=0% across centers). Of 24 patients with a second UACR available, 14 (58%) confirmed CKD, yielding a pooled confirmed-CKD rate of 8.9% of all screened patients. In-hospital mortality was significantly higher among patients with pathological UACR (9.3% vs ~2%; Fisher's exact p=0.012). In per-center multivariate logistic regression, three predictors reached pooled significance: BUN (OR 1.10 per mg/dL, 95% CI 1.04-1.17, p=0.002, I2=0%), heart failure (OR 3.21, 95% CI 1.34-7.70, p=0.009, I2=0%), and diabetes mellitus (OR 2.54, 95% CI 1.11-5.82, p=0.028, I2=17%). Cardiac/vascular admissions had the highest pathological UACR rate (~42%); GI/hepatic admissions had 0%. Conclusions. Opportunistic inpatient UACR screening identifies previously unrecognized CKD in approximately 9% of general internal medicine patients, with consistent results across three independent centers. BUN elevation, heart failure, and diabetes are the strongest independent predictors. Pathological UACR carries significant short-term mortality risk, supporting integration of routine screening into inpatient care pathways.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Curvature-Guided Geometric Representation for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

Authors:
Shuai Li↗Chuan-Xian Ren↗Yuhao Li↗Ziqi Huang↗Yue Pan↗Mingzhe Tang↗Hong Yan↗

arXiv:2606.14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery. Despite the notable advancements in machine learning-based approaches, existing methods struggle to jointly characterize local geometric organization and globally coordinated cross-molecular interactions, limiting their ability to model complex binding mechanisms. Here, we propose RicciBind, a geometric representation framework that integrates curvature-guided hierarchical structure learning with optimal transport (OT)-based cross-domain alignment to model molecular interactions. Specifically, RicciBind leverages Ricci curvature to capture local interaction tightness within molecular structures, enhancing structural awareness and organizing atomic interactions into curvature-aware hierarchical representations. An OT-based cluster matching mechanism then aligns protein and ligand clusters across heterogeneous domains under geometric constraints, enabling globally consistent correspondences and revealing higher-order interaction patterns beyond local neighborhoods. By coupling curvature-guided structure encoding with OT-driven cross-domain alignment, RicciBind effectively models complex interaction semantics and substantially improves both the accuracy and interpretability of binding affinity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RicciBind achieved superior predictive performance and generalization across PLA benchmarks and virtual screening tasks. Ablation studies further confirmed the essential role of Ricci curvature in enhancing molecular interaction representations.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Divide-and-Denoise: A Game-Theoretic Method for Fairly Composing Diffusion Models

Authors:
Abhi Gupta↗Polina Barabanshchikova↗Vikas Garg↗Samuel Kaski↗Tommi Jaakkola↗

The abundance of pre-trained diffusion models provides an opportunity for composition. Combining several models, however, runs the risk of one model dominating or models disagreeing with each other. Here, we propose Divide-and-Denoise, a method for coordinating multiple pre-trained diffusion models during sampling. Much like managing a specialized workforce, our method creates a fair but efficient division of labor across models. Central to our method is the notion of an allocation which defines the responsibility of each model to every region of the noisy sample. At every timestep, we then denoise by (i) updating the allocation by solving a fair division game, where we divide the sample into regions that maximize total utility under fairness constraints, and (ii) aligning the models with this allocation, where we guide each model to denoise within its assigned region. This leads to a new composite denoising process that evolves in tandem with a division process. We evaluate Divide-and-Denoise on conditional image generation. Across several quality metrics, including the GenEval benchmark, our method outperforms baselines and resolves common failures including missing objects and mismatched attributes. Experiments show that Divide-and-Denoise utilizes each model's expertise without neglecting any other model.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Iterative Tool Usage Exploration for Multimodal Agents via Step-wise Preference Tuning

Authors:
Pengxiang Li↗Zhi Gao↗Bofei Zhang↗Yapeng Mi↗Xiaojian Ma↗Chenrui Shi↗Tao Yuan↗Yuwei Wu↗Yunde Jia↗Song-Chun Zhu↗Qing Li↗

Multimodal agents, which integrate a controller e.g., a vision language model) with external tools, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tackling complex multimodal tasks. Existing approaches for training these agents, both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, depend on extensive human-annotated task-answer pairs and tool trajectories. However, for complex multimodal tasks, such annotations are prohibitively expensive or impractical to obtain. In this paper, we propose an iterative tool usage exploration method for multimodal agents without any pre-collected data, namely SPORT, via step-wise preference optimization to refine the trajectories of tool usage. Our method enables multimodal agents to autonomously discover effective tool usage strategies through self-exploration and optimization, eliminating the bottleneck of human annotation. SPORT has four iterative components: task synthesis, step sampling, step verification, and preference tuning. We first synthesize multimodal tasks using language models. Then, we introduce a novel trajectory exploration scheme, where step sampling and step verification are executed alternately to solve synthesized tasks. In step sampling, the agent tries different tools and obtains corresponding results. In step verification, we employ a verifier to provide AI feedback to construct step-wise preference data. The data is subsequently used to update the controller for tool usage through preference tuning, producing a SPORT agent. By interacting with real environments, the SPORT agent gradually evolves into a more refined and capable system. Evaluation in the GTA and GAIA benchmarks shows that the SPORT agent achieves 6.41% and 3.64% improvements, underscoring the generalization and effectiveness introduced by our method. The project page is https://SPORT-Agents.github.io.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Freeing the Law with LOCUS: A Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States

Authors:
Denis Peskoff↗Joe Barrow↗Christopher Vu↗Diag Davenport↗

Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Local codes govern zoning, housing, business licensing, public health, noise, animal control, and many other domains of everyday regulation, but they are fragmented across vendor platforms designed for human browsing rather than bulk research access. We introduce LOCUS - the Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States - a comprehensive corpus and county-harmonized access layer for U.S. municipal and county ordinance codes. The raw corpus, available for release to researchers, represents nearly all publicly available municipal and county ordinance codes. The resulting raw corpus contains codes from 9,239 cities and counties. A smaller county-harmonized LOCUS access layer provides coverage for the largest 2,309 of 3,144 U.S. counties, accounting for a majority of the population. We use OCR to handle the myriad of document formats that have kept the law from being a public resource. We release the corpus with coverage metadata to support reproducibility, downstream legal AI research, and the incremental expansion of machine-readable access to local law. We train a collection of ModernBERT-based classifiers and scorers to facilitate analyzing U.S. local law among several dimensions, such as opacity and paternalism, that have not previously been studied at this scale. LOCUS-v1 and its derivative models are available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LocalLaws/LOCUS-v1

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

TaskFusion: Continual Anomaly Detection for Heterogeneous Tabular Data

Authors:
Dayananda Herurkar↗Federico Raue↗Joachim Folz↗J\"orn Hees↗Andreas Dengel↗

arXiv:2606.11844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual anomaly detection in tabular data is challenging and remains largely underexplored, particularly in settings with heterogeneous feature schemas, distribution shifts, and severe class imbalance. In many real-world applications, data arrive sequentially from diverse domains, rendering conventional continual learning methods ineffective due to their reliance on a fixed input space. We propose a continual learning (CL) method, which can overcome these challenges and continually learn from different tasks. Our method consists of three main parts: our AGF model, Taskfusion augmentation, and outlier exposure. The AGF-model maps task-specific features into a shared space, then aligns distributions to reduce representation drift, and learns anomaly decision boundaries in the aligned space. To improve stability, we introduce Taskfusion augmentation, combining boundary-aware interpolation within tasks to refine the model anomaly boundaries and cross-task mixing to transfer anomaly structure across datasets. To handle class imbalance and memory constraints, we employ tabular dataset distillation to store compact synthetic replay samples, which are jointly used with augmented data in an outlier exposure objective for robust anomaly detection. We evaluate the approach on 21 heterogeneous datasets across multiple domains. Results show that our approach substantially improves continual anomaly detection performance over sequential fine-tuning and other CL baselines while reducing catastrophic forgetting and maintaining stable detection across heterogeneous datasets.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Multi-User Dueling Bandits: A Fair Approach using Nash Social Welfare

Authors:
Maheed H. Ahmed↗Mahsa Ghasemi↗

arXiv:2605.01961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents. However, in most scenarios, the model is trained on the average preference of all human evaluators, which, under large variations of preferences, can be unfair to minority groups. In this work, we consider fairness in dueling bandits, a standard framework for online learning from preference data. We assume that each user has a (potentially distinct) Condorcet winner, which is an arm preferred to every other arm. Using these user-specific Condorcet winners as reference points, we evaluate and score arms according to their performance relative to the corresponding winner. To promote fairness across heterogeneous users, we adopt the well-established Nash Social Welfare objective, which maximizes the product of user utilities, thereby inherently penalizing inequality and preventing the marginalization of any single user. Within this framework, we construct a hard instance to establish a regret lower bound of $\Omega(T^{2/3}\min(K,D)^\frac{1}{3})$ for a time horizon $T$, $K$ arms, and $D$ users, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first result quantifying the cost of fairness in dueling bandits with heterogeneous preferences. We then present the Fair-Explore-Then-Commit and Fair-$\epsilon$-Greedy algorithms with a Condorcet winner identification phase. We further derive their regret upper bounds that match the lower-bound dependence on $T$ up to logarithmic factors.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Drug-Prot: A query system for statistical inference of drug effects and interactions in dynamic proteomic networks

Authors:
Ulmer↗Sun↗Qian↗Aebersold↗Guo↗Buehlmann↗

Understanding drug effects and drug-drug interactions is essential for developing combination therapies. We present Drug-Prot, a computational framework that leverages large-scale perturbation proteomics to quantify causal drug effects, drug-drug interactions, and dynamic protein relationships. Using data from 63 single drugs and 59 drug combinations applied to 18 breast cancer cell lines at 6, 24, and 48 hours, Drug-Prot estimates drug effects on protein expression and reconstructs directed temporal protein dependency networks. The publicly available software enables targeted analyses of user-defined protein sets, substantially reducing the multiple-testing burden. Through an interactive web application, users obtain corrected p-values for single-drug and combination effects, directed temporal dependency networks, and downloadable results without requiring access to the underlying proteomic dataset. As a use case, we apply invariance-regularized Random Forests to triple-negative breast cancer cell lines to identify proteins associated with drug response. Querying these proteins in Drug-Prot reveals drug-specific and interaction effects at the protein-network level, illustrating how the framework links candidate causal protein features to actionable drug combinations.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MobilityBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Route-Planning Agents in Real-World Mobility Scenarios

Authors:
Zhiheng Song↗Jingshuai Zhang↗Chuan Qin↗Chao Wang↗Chao Chen↗Longfei Xu↗Kaikui Liu↗Xiangxiang Chu↗Hengshu Zhu↗

arXiv:2602.22638v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Route-planning agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for supporting everyday human mobility through natural language interaction and tool-mediated decision making. However, systematic evaluation in real-world mobility settings is hindered by diverse routing demands, non-deterministic mapping services, and limited reproducibility. In this study, we introduce MobilityBench, a scalable benchmark for evaluating LLM-based route-planning agents in real-world mobility scenarios. MobilityBench is constructed from large-scale, anonymized real user queries collected from Amap and covers a broad spectrum of route-planning intents across multiple cities worldwide. To enable reproducible, end-to-end evaluation, we design a deterministic API-replay sandbox that eliminates environmental variance from live services. We further propose a multi-dimensional evaluation protocol centered on outcome validity, complemented by assessments of instruction understanding, planning, tool use, and efficiency. Using MobilityBench, we evaluate multiple LLM-based route-planning agents across diverse real-world mobility scenarios and provide an in-depth analysis of their behaviors and performance. Our findings reveal that current models perform competently on Basic information retrieval and Route Planning tasks, yet struggle considerably with Preference-Constrained Route Planning, underscoring significant room for improvement in personalized mobility applications. We publicly release the benchmark data, evaluation toolkit, and documentation at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/MobilityBench.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Pseudo-Feature Padding: A Lightweight Defense Against False Data Injection in Power Grids

Authors:
Farhin Farhad Riya↗Shahinul Hoque↗Yingyuan Yang↗Jinyuan Sun↗Kevin Tomsovic↗

arXiv:2606.20415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Neural Networks DNNs have achieved remarkable accuracy in various tasks including their application in CyberPhysical Systems CPS for detecting False Data Injection Attacks FDIA during critical operations However the unique infrastructure of CPS makes DNNs vulnerable to exploitation by attackers aiming to evade detection Additionally the distinct nature of CPS presents challenges for conventional defense mechanisms against FDIA This paper proposes an innovative defense framework that strengthens DNNs against such attacks by introducing an additional input layer that performs padding in the input samples using pseudofeature values derived from the inputs statistical distribution This padding increases the input dimensionality in a randomized and dataaware manner making adversarial attacks computationally infeasible due to the nontransferable nature of crafted perturbations and the unpredictability of the padded structure Our method is lightweight modelagnostic and requires no modifications to the core architecture making it highly deployable in realworld CPS settings We evaluated our framework on critical power grid applications such as state estimation using the IEEE 14bus 30bus 118bus and 300bus systems Experiments under adversarial settings demonstrate that our padding strategy significantly improves model robustness with negligible impact on performance and effectively mitigates attacks that would otherwise bypass conventional defenses

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Shopping Reasoning Bench: An Expert-Authored Benchmark for Multi-Turn Conversational Shopping Assistants

Authors:
Shuxian Fan↗Seonwoo Min↗Youna Hu↗Botao Xia↗Jayakrishnan Unnikrishnan↗Rowan Musselmann↗Yifan Gao↗Qingyu Yin↗Priyanka Nigam↗Bing Yin↗

Conversational shopping assistants now serve hundreds of millions of customers, yet no existing benchmark jointly evaluates the open-ended multi-turn reasoning, domain expertise, and criterion-level quality that real shopping conversations demand. Shopping reasoning is unique among language model applications. Unlike factual question answering or verifiable code generation, it requires balancing subjective preferences, budget constraints, and cross-product trade-offs across multi-turn dialogue, capabilities absent from previous e-commerce and general-purpose benchmarks. We introduce the Shopping Reasoning Bench, an expert-authored benchmark of 525 missions (232 single-turn, 293 multi-turn) with 10863 importance-weighted binary rubrics authored by retail domain experts. These criteria are organized under a taxonomy of five reasoning categories and fifteen subcategories covering diverse demands such as preference refinement, trade-off analysis, and compatibility assessment. An evaluation of nine models across three families (GPT, Claude, Gemini) shows that pass rates reach only 57–77% overall. On multi-turn missions, all models score 13–29 points lower on optional above-and-beyond criteria than on required ones, and performance degrades 4–18 points as conversations progress. These gaps show that current models handle basic shopping assistance but fall short of expert-level advice, making Shopping Reasoning Bench a challenging testbed for future shopping assistant development.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Correctness: Enhancing Architectural Reasoning in Code LLMs via Scalable Labeling with Agentic Judgment

Authors:
Kirill Vasilevski↗Ximing Dong↗Benjamin Rombaut↗Ruochen Deng↗Jiahuei Lin↗Arthur Leung↗Dayi Lin↗Boyuan Chen↗Shaowei Wang↗Ahmed E. Hassan↗

arXiv:2606.14948v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have substantially improved software engineering yet real-world development requires architectural understanding. Such understanding is prohibitively expensive to label manually and impossible to verify through tests alone. We propose an agentic judging pipeline using a strong LLM as a scalable proxy for expert architectural evaluation, comprising two judges: the Architecture Complexity Judge (ACJ), which estimates codebase-specific architectural understanding a task demands, and the Architecture Quality Judge (AQJ), which evaluates patch conformance to repository-specific architectural conventions via source-grounded rubrics. Fine-tuning Qwen3-8B/14B/32B on 3,360 curated instances achieves resolved rates of up to 27.2% on SWE-bench Verified - up to 540% over the base model and 256% over unfiltered fine-tuning. Meanwhile, the trained models achieve strong cross-language generalization and consistent improvements in architectural patch quality.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Encoding parameters by measurement: Forgetting can be better in quantum metrology

Authors:
Shuva Mondal↗Priya Ghosh↗Ujjwal Sen↗

arXiv:2512.10541v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce quantum parameter estimation with the encoding being via a quantum measurement. We quantify the precision for estimating parameters characterizing a general two-outcome qubit measurement, considering two cases: when the outcomes of the encoding measurement are recorded and when the same are ignored. We find that in a large variety of such estimation scenarios, forgetting the outcomes yields higher precision. We derive a necessary criterion under which remembering the measurement outcomes provides better precision in comparison to the outcome-forgotten strategy. Furthermore, we establish a necessary and sufficient criterion for the simultaneous estimation of multiple parameters encoded by an arbitrary quantum process, including those involving measurements, using qubit probes, and find when the quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound is valid and achievable. For simultaneous estimation of two parameters characterizing the measurement, we find that the achievable quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound can be a valid precision bound only when the measurement direction depends on the parameters of interest.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Decoupled Motion Representation Learning for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

Authors:
Guoyi Zhang↗Peiwen Wu↗Han Wang↗Xiangpeng Xu↗Xiaohu Zhang↗

Infrared small target detection in dynamic scenes remains challenging due to the highly coupled motions among targets, imaging platforms, and dynamic backgrounds. Existing multi-frame methods usually perform implicit temporal modeling, where coherent background dynamics dominate motion correspondence learning, leading to an inherent trade-off between detection and false alarms. In this work, we observe that background motions exhibit strong global coherence, whereas small targets mainly correspond to sparse local motion anomalies. Moreover, many false-alarm responses maintain high consistency with globally coherent motion patterns, indicating that they mainly originate from coherent background dynamics rather than genuine target motions. Based on these observations, we propose a decoupled motion representation learning framework for moving infrared small target detection. Specifically, an explicit motion branch is introduced to model globally coherent motion dynamics using pretrained optical flow priors, together with a structure-preserving self-supervised adaptation strategy for infrared motion correspondence learning. Meanwhile, an implicit motion branch based on deformable feature alignment is designed to capture target-sensitive local motion anomalies under coherent motion guidance. Furthermore, a coherent-motion-guided local anomaly reasoning module is proposed to identify and suppress coherent-motion-induced false responses during localized motion modeling. Extensive experiments on two challenging infrared small target detection benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in dynamic scenes with complex motions, while maintaining favorable inference efficiency.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Modelling the public-health impact of indoor air quality interventions on respiratory virus transmission

Authors:
Howes↗Jeyapragasan↗Williamson↗Carel↗Koos↗Swett↗J. L↗Montavon↗Belenky↗Lietar↗Fitzjohn↗Charles↗…

Respiratory virus transmission occurs in indoor settings where ventilation, occupancy, and dwell time determine exposure levels. Improving indoor air quality (IAQ) therefore could help reduce disease burden associated with respiratory viruses, yet its population-level impact remains poorly quantified. Here, we develop an individual-based transmission modelling framework that links within-location airborne dynamics to individual infection risk and population-level spread, whilst explicitly incorporating heterogeneity in ventilation and baseline indoor air quality across locations. We use this modelling approach to evaluate IAQ-improving interventions (air-quality interventions or AQIs), using hypothetical endemic and pandemic pathogen archetypes with properties similar to SARS-CoV-2 and influenza, and evaluate how effects on key epidemiological metrics (such as annualized incidence and epidemic final size) depend on AQI coverage, efficacy and allocation strategy. At 20% AQI intervention coverage and 80% efficacy, annualized incidence was reduced by approximately 7.2% for an endemic 'SARS-CoV-2-like' respiratory virus, and 17.0% for an endemic 'influenza-like' virus; at 60% coverage (80% efficacy) the reductions were 26.3% and 56.4%, respectively. Targeting AQI installation to the highest-risk locations outperformed random allocation: for SARS-CoV-2-like transmission, 20% coverage at 80% efficacy cut absolute incidence by 10.8% when targeted versus 7.2% when random; for influenza-like transmission, this comparison was 28.9% versus 17.0%. In epidemic scenarios, random installation at 40% coverage and 60% efficacy reduced final size by 23.7% (influenza-like) versus 6.3% (SARS-CoV-2-like). These results support treating clean indoor air as core public-health infrastructure and prioritising risk-based deployment of IAQ-improving interventions to maximise population-level benefit within budgetary and operational constraints.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Worst-case depth hierarchy for shallow quantum circuits

Authors:
Min-Hsiu Hsieh↗Michael de Oliveira↗Sathyawageeswar Subramanian↗Xingjian Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.16425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Circuit depth is a central resource in complexity theory. While bounded-depth classical circuits admit well-understood hierarchy theorems, the internal structure of constant-depth quantum computation remains comparatively unexplored. We prove an explicit depth hierarchy theorem for $\mathsf{QNC}^0$. For each $d\ge 12$, we construct a family of two-round interactive problems on which no depth-$(d-1)$ quantum circuit can achieve near-perfect success, regardless of gate set, circuit size, or ancillary qubits. In contrast, we prove that our construction admits realizations by simple bounded fan-in quantum circuits of depth larger than $d$ by a small constant factor. Moreover, all bounded fan-in classical circuits of sublogarithmic depth (in the input size) fail to achieve perfect success on these tasks for every $d$, yielding a hierarchy of problems that show unconditional quantum advantage of $\mathsf{QNC}^0$ over $\mathsf{NC}^0$. A key obstacle is the scarcity of lower bound techniques for quantum circuits. To address this, we develop methods to analyze how depth affects a circuit's ability to realize nonlocal correlations amongst its output qubits in a fine-grained manner. Our approach exploits the correspondence between constraint systems and nonlocal games, translating group-theoretic constructions into rigid operator-valued constraint systems and then into non-local games. In particular, we construct constraint systems whose unique faithful operator-valued solutions require every perfect strategy, and every near-perfect strategy to a fixed precision, to implement multi-controlled phase operations. This reduces to a nonlocal unitary-synthesis problem, yielding depth lower bounds for both shallow quantum and classical circuits. These results show that increasing depth strictly increases computational power within $\mathsf{QNC}^0$, establishing a genuinely quantum hierarchy.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Longest weakly increasing subsequences of discrete random walks on the integers with heavy tailed distribution of increments

Authors:
Jos\'e Ricardo G. Mendon\c{c}a↗Marcelo V. Freire↗

arXiv:2603.29047v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the behavior of the length of the longest weakly increasing subsequences (weak LIS) of $n$-step random walks with nonzero integer increments $k = \pm 1, \pm 2, \dots$ given by a symmetric heavy tailed mass distribution proportional to $|k|^{-1-\alpha}$ for several values of the real parameter $\alpha > 0$ together with that of the simple random walk ($k=\pm 1$), to which the $n$-step heavy tailed walks reduce when $\alpha$ grows large enough that step jumps beyond $\pm 1$ become essentially absent on the scale of $n$. By means of exploratory fits, weighted nonlinear least squares, and nested-model comparisons, we found that the sample average length $\langle{L_{n}}\rangle$ scales like $\langle{L_{n}}\rangle \sim \sqrt{n}\log{n}$ when the distribution of increments has finite variance ($\alpha > 2$) and $\langle{L_{n}}\rangle \sim n^{\theta}$ with a varying exponent $\theta > 0.5$ when the variance is infinite ($\alpha \leq 2$). Distributional diagnostics indicate that the bulk of the $L_{n}$ distribution is very well-approximated by a lognormal model, though systematic deviations are observed in the tails. Our results corroborate and expand upon previous results for the LIS of other types of heavy-tailed random walks and raise a conjecture as to whether the distribution of $L_{n}$ is given, or can be effectively described, by a lognormal distribution.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ScaffoldAgent: Utility-Guided Dynamic Outline Optimization for Open-Ended Deep Research

Authors:
Zhibang Yang↗Xinke Jiang↗Yuzhen Xiao↗Ruizhe Zhang↗Yue Fang↗XinFei Wan↗Zhengxing Song↗Yuxuan Liu↗Yuheng Huang↗Xu Chu↗Junfeng Zhao↗Yasha Wang↗…

arXiv:2606.20122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended deep research (OEDR) requires systems to acquire knowledge through multi-round retrieval and generate coherent long-form reports. The outline plays a central role as a structural scaffold that coordinates retrieval, evidence organization, and generation. However, existing methods either fix the outline before writing or refine it with local heuristics, leading to scaffold drift under continuous information accumulation and delayed feedback for evaluating outline modifications. We propose ScaffoldAgent, a utility-guided dynamic outline optimization framework for OEDR. ScaffoldAgent models outline evolution as a structured decision process with three operations: Expansion, Contraction, and Revision, enabling controlled updates to the report scaffold. It further introduces a utility-guided feedback mechanism that estimates the downstream value of each outline operation from retrieval gain, structural coherence, and trial-generation quality. The resulting utility signal guides node selection, operation scheduling, and termination during inference. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Gym show that ScaffoldAgent consistently improves long-form report generation and factual grounding over existing deep research agents.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demultiplexing Generalized Information via Quantum Transmission Lines

Authors:
Soham Sau↗Anna Jen\v{c}ov\'a↗Tamal Guha↗

arXiv:2606.17894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Demultiplexers are the fundamental primitives of network architecture, enabling perfect routing of an input classical signal to a designated one, among multiple output ports. Quantum transmission lines, having access to the quantum systems directly, are able to transmit both the classical and quantum information encoded in quantum systems. A natural question therefore emerges that whether the scrambled classical and quantum information in a quantum system can be perfectly demultiplexed in the designated classical and quantum output ports? Here we answer this question by introducing a quantum to quantum-classical device, namely the quantum demultiplexer (Q-DEMUX). We characterize the class of Q-DEMUXs enabling perfect routing of both the classical and the quantum information along with their simple circuit realizations. Our results highlight an explicit connection between the strength of a Q-DEMUX with the incompatibility of quantum instruments. Finally, we extend the notion in a stronger variant where the sender is oblivious regarding the nature of the data to be transmitted through the Q-DEMUX.

Read & Discuss → View Source →