Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Gaussian superpositions for bosonic encodings

arXiv:2603.15258v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Non-Gaussian bosonic states are ubiquitous in interacting light–matter systems, many-body platforms, and relativistic quantum field settings, but their quantitative characterization is hindered by the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space and by the poor scalability of Fock-space truncation methods. We introduce an exact finite-manifold encoding for states supported on a finite span of Gaussian branches, enabling the use of standard finite-dimensional quantum-information tools directly on an effective density matrix whose entries are determined by Gaussian overlaps. As demonstrations, we obtain closed-form and numerically stable evaluations of entropies and relative-entropy non-Gaussianity, and derive an analytic expression for the bipartite entanglement negativity of arbitrary multimode two-branch Gaussian superpositions, including a minimal which-branch dephasing model. Our framework provides a practical bridge between experimentally accessible continuous-variable resources (e.g., cat-like and measurement-conditioned states) and discrete-variable information measures, with immediate applications to benchmarking non-Gaussian resources in several quantum technology platforms.

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

DeFrame: Debiasing Large Language Models Against Framing Effects

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their fair responses across demographics has become crucial. Despite many efforts, an ongoing challenge is hidden bias: LLMs appear fair under standard evaluations, but can produce biased responses outside those evaluation settings. In this paper, we identify framing – differences in how semantically equivalent prompts are expressed (e.g., "A is better than B" vs. "B is worse than A") – as an underexplored contributor to this gap. We first introduce the concept of "framing disparity" to quantify the impact of framing on fairness evaluation. By augmenting fairness evaluation benchmarks with alternative framings, we find that (1) fairness scores vary significantly with framing and (2) existing debiasing methods improve overall (i.e., frame-averaged) fairness, but often fail to reduce framing-induced disparities. To address this, we propose a framing-aware debiasing method that encourages LLMs to be more consistent across framings. Experiments demonstrate that our approach reduces overall bias and improves robustness against framing disparities, enabling LLMs to produce fairer and more consistent responses.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for PDEs

arXiv:2606.20326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop QCPIKAN, the first quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold network designed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Built upon Chebyshev-polynomial KAN layers and parameterized quantum circuits, this hybrid framework embeds physical constraints into the training loss to enforce physical consistency. Our theoretical investigations grounded in approximation theory prove that this design accelerates high-frequency error convergence to an exponential rate and effectively mitigates numerical dispersion. We validate the framework across three typical seepage scenarios in porous media, including single-phase flow, component transport and two-phase flow. Compared with existing quantum-classical physics-informed neural networks, QCPIKAN achieves superior performance in global prediction accuracy, local error control, dynamic evolution tracking and displacement front localization. This work provides a robust and efficient alternative for solving complex PDEs.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Dual-branch Prompting for Multimodal Machine Translation

Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) typically enhances text-only translation by incorporating aligned visual features. Despite the remarkable progress, state-of-the-art MMT approaches often rely on paired image-text inputs at inference and are sensitive to irrelevant visual noise, which limits their robustness and practical applicability. To address these issues, we propose D2P-MMT, a diffusion-based dual-branch prompting framework for robust vision-guided translation. Specifically, D2P-MMT requires only the source text and a reconstructed image generated by a pre-trained diffusion model, which naturally filters out distracting visual details while preserving semantic cues. During training, the model jointly learns from both authentic and reconstructed images using a dual-branch prompting strategy, encouraging rich cross-modal interactions. To bridge the modality gap and mitigate training-inference discrepancies, we introduce a distributional alignment loss that enforces consistency between the output distributions of the two branches. Extensive experiments on the Multi30K dataset demonstrate that D2P-MMT achieves superior translation performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MentaY/DDP.

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

User as Engram: Internalizing Per-User Memory as Local Parametric Edits

作者:

arXiv:2606.19172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personal memory in a language model is two problems: content and reasoning skill. The brain keeps the two apart (a sparse, local engram in the hippocampus for each episode, a slow neocortex for the shared skills that interpret it), so a new fact need not overwrite everything else. Most personalization today keeps a user's facts outside the weights, in a natural-language memory file or a retrieval index. When facts are written into the model instead, the standard recipe is the per-user LoRA adapter, which does the opposite of the brain, folding content and skill into one global weight delta. Writing a user's facts as a LoRA contaminates text unrelated to them; writing the same facts as local Engram rows leaves it mathematically untouched, resulting in a roughly 33,000x smaller memory footprint. We therefore propose User as Engram: store a user's content as surgical edits to the hash-keyed memory table of an Engram model, and carry the reasoning skill in one shared adapter. This layered design matches per-user LoRA's direct recall while delivering 5.6x higher indirect-reasoning accuracy on average, and never makes a single user worse at reasoning than the untouched base. The edit is a glass box: writing a fact switches on its lookup at exactly the trigger, adds the value the answer needs, leaves every other position unchanged to the last bit, and fails if written into the wrong layer. Because different users' facts land in disjoint hash slots, their edits compose: many users live in one shared table at once, stacking additively and losslessly, where a per-user LoRA, a single global weight delta, admits only one. Upon retrieval, a per-user Engram table does not grow with the population the retriever must search, so past ~100 facts it overtakes a retrieval pipeline on a 2.5x larger model.

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

SpeechDx: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Clinical Speech AI

Speech offers a uniquely informative window into health by simultaneously engaging neurological, motor, respiratory, and vocal systems. Current clinical speech AI methods have largely progressed through isolated condition-specific studies, making results difficult to compare and generalization difficult to assess. We introduce SpeechDx, a large-scale benchmark for clinical speech AI spanning 12 datasets and 27 tasks across diverse health conditions. To enable evaluation across shared clinical mechanisms, SpeechDx structures tasks by the stage of speech production they disrupt: conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. The benchmark tests generalization by including tasks with limited labeled data and evaluating the same health condition across multiple datasets, distinguishing clinically meaningful patterns from dataset artefacts. We systematically evaluate 12 state-of-the-art audio encoders across all tasks and under zero-shot cross-condition transfer. Results show that large-scale speech models represent the strongest overall baselines, domain-specific models improve performance only on closely matched tasks, and no current representation generalizes reliably across the clinical speech landscape. SpeechDx establishes a shared evaluation framework for tracking progress toward general-purpose clinical speech representations

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Allocating Human Oversight in AI-Enabled Analytics

arXiv:2604.12497v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Organizations increasingly deploy AI as a low-cost prediction layer in customer-facing decision processes, including demand sensing, service-quality monitoring, product testing, and market research, but AI-generated signals are unevenly reliable across tasks, products, and customer segments. Firms therefore still need scarce human validation (labels, audits, survey responses, or follow-up measurements) to anchor AI outputs to ground truth. Because human ground truth is itself noisy, varying across labelers and even across repeated judgments, the firm must collect and average several human labels per task, which makes human validation costly. We study how to allocate a limited human-validation budget across many AI-assisted tasks when reliability is heterogeneous and unknown before deployment. We cast this within tuned prediction-powered inference. Each human label both sharpens the AI-assisted estimate and reveals the task's rectification difficulty, the variance that remains after the AI prediction is optimally used as a control variate. If difficulties were known, the optimal allocation would follow a Neyman square-root rule; because they are unknown, we propose a policy based on upper confidence bounds that learns them online and steers validation toward tasks where AI is least reliable. We prove that the policy's terminal efficiency loss relative to the oracle allocation vanishes as the budget grows. In synthetic experiments and a real digital-twin survey with 68 tasks and over 2000 respondents, it closes most of the gap to the oracle when reliability is heterogeneous, outperforming uniform and epsilon-greedy allocation; on the survey data it also outperforms explore-then-commit pilot designs and cuts uniform's 10–12% gap to 2–6%. The value of AI depends not only on model accuracy but also on the operational policy that targets human oversight where AI errors matter most.

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

CAP: Towards PPG Universal Representation Learning with Patient-level Supervision

arXiv:2606.15284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Photoplethysmography (PPG) plays a central role in wearable health monitoring and clinical decision support. Yet existing approaches to universal PPG representation learning largely focus on signal-level objectives and often overlook patient-level health context, which limits generalization to complex clinical tasks and heterogeneous cohorts. To address this gap, we construct a large-scale paired PPG-EHR multimodal dataset by distilling fragmented medical histories and clinical records into cohesive, patient-level electronic health records (EHR). Building on this resource, we propose Clinical Anchored Pretraining for PPG (CAP). During pretraining, CAP performs cross-modal contrastive alignment that anchors PPG representations to patient-level clinical semantics, guiding the encoder beyond waveform fitting toward modeling consistency in a patient's overall physiological state. During downstream adaptation, the pretrained PPG encoder provides clinically grounded representations that strengthen inductive bias and improve robustness and transferability. Experiments demonstrate that CAP consistently outperforms strong baselines on four diverse downstream tasks. CAP achieves a particularly large gain on respiratory rate prediction (up to +87.6% relative improvement over the state-of-the-art baseline) and delivers an average relative +26.7% across all tasks. We further enhance the interpretability of our approach through comprehensive analyses, including ablations and multiple complementary visualizations of the learned representations. The code for our experiments is available at: https://github.com/gody123gody/CAP .

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

StepGuard: Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration

arXiv:2606.17871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web navigation requires agents to follow natural language goals, interact with web pages, and produce accurate answers. While recent advances leverage vision-language models and reinforcement learning, existing methods still suffer from single-step fragility due to reward misalignment and error propagation. To tackle the reward entanglement, we design Dynamic Dual-Policy Optimization (DDPO), which dynamically switches between a navigation-first mode for exploration and an answer-first mode for question-answering to mitigate reward conflict. To calibrate the single-step error, we propose Confidence-Guided Adaptive Navigation Reflection (CANR), a mechanism that estimates per-step confidence, triggers reflection only when necessary, and uses contrastive rewards to encourage self-correction to calibrate the single-step inaccuracy. With the above as the main components, we finally develop our StepGuard, a new framework of Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves navigation and answer accuracy, setting new state-of-the-art performance on standard web navigation benchmarks.

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

SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing

arXiv:2606.14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows. Skills rarely remain sufficient after deployment: edge cases, API changes, and deployment constraints become visible only through use, making skill evolution a practical necessity. Existing methods depend on privileged feedback such as held-out validation scores, hidden test outcomes, or environment rewards – signals often unavailable when a practitioner has only a task description and workspace data. We introduce SkillAudit, a framework for evolving agent skills without ground-truth feedback. The key idea is paired trajectory auditing: at each iteration, the same task is executed with and without the candidate skill, isolating how the skill changes agent behavior without external labels. To turn behavioral differences into edit guidance, SkillAudit uses Process-Aligned Contrastive Evaluation (PACE), a cluster of evaluators that maps trajectory divergences to diagnostic signals linked to specific passages in the skill document. A structural verifier, compiled once from the task specification and then fixed, checks task constraints and rolls back harmful updates. SkillAudit routes edits through two pipelines: Refine removes noisy or irrelevant guidance from broadly useful skills, while Repair replaces passages that conflict with the task. Across 89 containerized tasks spanning 8 professional domains, SkillAudit achieves 73.9% average task reward, outperforming an agent without skills (40.9%) and the static expert skill (56.7%). These gains are obtained without accessing hidden tests, reference solutions, or external scoring functions during evolution.

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

Tac-DINO: Learning Vision-Tactile Features with Patch Alignment

Touch is the primary medium through which humans interact with the environment. Currently, tactile learning mainly focuses on image-level pretraining or alignment. However, tactile signals correspond to local object contact, while research into scale alignment and holographic matching remains limited and proper datasets and benchmarks also lack. To bridge this gap, we first construct a data collection system to acquire a large-scale tactile dataset, with over 20 K tactile contacts from 505 real-world objects. Building on this dataset, we design a Vis-Tac Holographic Matching Benchmark to evaluate vision-tactile local-to-global alignment ability. Then we propose Vision-Tactile Patch Alignment (VTPA) methods for vision-tactile representation learning. Experiments demonstrate that these exceed the performance of methods without alignment and align with whole-object images.

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

Does the Data Processing Inequality Reflect Practice? On the Utility of Low-Level Tasks

The data processing inequality is an information-theoretic principle stating that the information content of a signal cannot be increased by processing the observations. In particular, it suggests that there is no benefit in enhancing the signal or encoding it before addressing a classification problem. This assertion can be proven to be true for the case of the optimal Bayes classifier. However, in practice, it is common to perform "low-level" tasks before "high-level" downstream tasks despite the overwhelming capabilities of modern deep neural networks. In this paper, we aim to understand when and why low-level processing can be beneficial for classification. We present a comprehensive theoretical study of a binary classification setup, where we consider a classifier that is tightly connected to the optimal Bayes classifier and converges to it as the number of training samples increases. We prove that for any finite number of training samples, there exists a pre-classification processing that improves the classification accuracy. We also explore the effect of class separation, training set size, and class balance on the relative gain from this procedure. We support our theory with an empirical investigation of the theoretical setup. Finally, we conduct an empirical study where we investigate the effect of denoising and encoding on the performance of practical deep classifiers on benchmark datasets. Specifically, we vary the size and class distribution of the training set, and the noise level, and demonstrate trends that are consistent with our theoretical results.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A high-quality chromosome-scale reference genome assembly for Asparagus racemosus var. CIM-Shakti (Shatavari), a medicinal plant of Ayurvedic importance

Asparagus racemosus Wild., commonly known as Shatavari, is an important medicinal plant in Ayurveda and is valued for its steroidal saponins, particularly shatavarin compounds, which contribute to its adaptogenic, galactagogue, immunomodulatory, and therapeutic properties. Despite its medicinal and economic importance, genomic resources for this species have remained limited, restricting molecular breeding, pathway discovery, and comparative evolutionary studies within Asparagaceae. Here, we report a high quality chromosome scale reference genome assembly of A. racemosus var. CIM Shakti generated using PacBio HiFi long read sequencing and Omni C chromatin conformation scaffolding. The pseudo haploid assembly spans 817 Mb across 53 scaffolds, with a scaffold N50 of 98.50 Mb, L50 of 5, and a largest scaffold of 113.80 Mb. Ten major chromosome scale pseudomolecules were resolved, corresponding to the haploid chromosome complement of A. racemosus. The assembly showed high gene space completeness, with BUSCO completeness of 99.8% against the Eukaryota dataset and 98.0% against the Embryophyta dataset. BlobToolKit profiling further supported assembly quality, with GC content of approximately 39 to 40% and no major evidence of contamination. EDTA based repeat annotation identified 580.93 Mb of interspersed repetitive elements, accounting for 71.06% of the 817.57 Mb genome assembly. The repeat landscape was dominated by LTR retrotransposons, particularly Gypsy elements, which accounted for 25.01% of the assembly, followed by unclassified LTR elements at 26.58% and Copia elements at 4.84%. Structural and functional annotation identified 29,199 protein coding genes represented by 29,199 transcript models, 138,433 exons, and 125,201 CDS features. The annotation was structurally robust, with an average gene length of 4,605.1 bp, 4.74 exons per transcript, and 97.80% of transcripts containing multiple exons. The CIM Shakti reference genome provides a foundational genomic resource for investigating steroidal saponin biosynthesis, sex chromosome evolution, repeat driven genome expansion, and comparative genomics in Asparagaceae. This assembly will support future studies on medicinal trait improvement, conservation genomics, and genomics assisted breeding of climate resilient Shatavari cultivars.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Few-Shot Classification of C. elegans Developmental Stages via Explainable Hierarchical Hyperbolic Graph Embeddings

Automated, accurate, and fast developmental-stage classification of C. elegans from microscopy-based morphological images is essential for aging research, drug screening, and disease modeling. However, it remains challenging due to morphological similarities between stages and the limited annotated data. In this work, we propose HyperDev, a hyperbolic few-shot learning framework that addresses these limitations by directly encoding developmental hierarchies in the embedding space, unlike conventional Euclidean approaches that treat stages as independent classes. HyperDev uses Poincare ball geometry, combined with a biologically informed developmental prior, to naturally represent stage relationships. We introduce our selfcurated C. elegans dataset spanning seven developmental stages (Egg, L1-L4, Adult, Dauer) with extreme class imbalance (6-8 samples per minority class). HyperDev achieves competitive classification accuracy (76.9-88.3%) while providing intrinsic explainability across nine 7-way few-shot evaluation settings. The learned embeddings exhibited strong biological alignment (Pearson r = 0.669, p < 0.001), while significantly outperforming ProtoNet (r = 0.187), MatchingNet (r = 0.235), and RelationNet (r = 0.464). These results establish hyperbolic geometry as a principled approach to explainable few-shot learning in biological imaging, where understanding learned representations is as critical as predictive performance. Clinical Relevance–By enabling explainable, data-efficient developmental staging from scarce samples, HyperDev supports improved phenotype quantification for aging research, disease modeling, and drug screening. Index Terms–Hyperbolic learning, few-shot classification, developmental staging, Caenorhabditis elegans, interpretability, explainability.

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

m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning

Vision–language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views. We introduce m2sv, a scalable benchmark for map-to-street-view spatial reasoning that asks models to infer camera viewing direction by aligning a north-up overhead map with a Street View image captured at the same real-world intersection. We release m2sv-20k, a geographically diverse benchmark with controlled ambiguity, along with m2sv-sft-11k, a curated set of structured reasoning traces for supervised fine-tuning. Despite strong performance on existing multimodal benchmarks, the best evaluated VLM achieves only 65.2% accuracy on m2sv, below human annotators who reach 72.0% on average (and 95% for an expert) with strong inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa$ up to 0.76). While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield consistent gains, cross-benchmark evaluations reveal limited transfer. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we systematically analyze difficulty in map-to-street-view reasoning using both structural signals and human effort, and conduct an extensive failure analysis of adapted open models. Our findings highlight persistent gaps in geometric alignment, evidence aggregation, and reasoning consistency, motivating future work on grounded spatial reasoning across viewpoints.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Automatic ply-specific analyses of CFRP micrographs using shortest-path-based ply distinction

We present an automated approach to distinguish between ply instances in semantic segmentation masks of high-resolution carbon-fiber reinforced polymer micrographs. Interpreting the segmentation mask as a graph with pixels as vertices, enables us to use a shortest-path algorithm yielding the ply-separating paths. Thereby, we bridge the gap between semantic segmentation and ply instance segmentation using global information. We successfully apply our approach on high-resolution micrographs featuring a broad range of characteristics like artificially added gaps in single or multiple plies, different stacking sequences and ply traversing cracks. Assigning each fiber pixel to a ply based on the calculated paths, allows for a comprehensive, quantitative ply analysis with respect to its microstructural properties like the local fiber volume fraction as well as locally resolved ply and interleaf layer thickness. These insights help to reveal manufacturing-induced inhomogeneities, draw conclusions on manufacturing parameters and link mechanical properties to underlying microstructural imperfections.

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

Vocabulary Dropout for Curriculum Diversity in LLM Co-Evolution

Co-evolutionary self-play, where one language model generates problems and another solves them, promises autonomous curriculum learning without human supervision. In practice, the proposer quickly converges to a narrow distribution of problems that satisfy the reward function. This diversity collapse renders the curriculum uninformative for the solver, stalling the co-evolutionary loop. We introduce vocabulary dropout, a random mask applied to the proposer's output logits during both policy training and curriculum generation, as a lightweight mechanism to sustain diversity. The mask is hard and non-stationary, preventing the proposer from locking into fixed token sequences. Training Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B on mathematical reasoning via R-Zero, we find that vocabulary dropout sustains proposer diversity across lexical, semantic, and functional metrics throughout training. It also yields solver improvements averaging +4.4 points at 8B, with the largest gains on competition-level benchmarks. Our findings suggest that explicit action-space constraints, analogous to the structural role that game rules play in classical self-play, can help sustain productive co-evolution in language. Vocabulary dropout is one simple instantiation of this principle.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reinforcing Dual-Path Reasoning in Spatial Vision Language Models

Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging. Moreover, different spatial queries call for fundamentally different strategies: some are best addressed through purely linguistic, step-by-step deduction, while others require explicit 3D grounding before quantitative inference. We present Dual-Path Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Spatial VLMs (SR-REAL), a unified framework that equips a spatial VLM with two complementary reasoning paths: Language-Only Reasoning (LOR), which performs step-by-step linguistic deduction, and Detect-Then-Reason (DTR), which detects 3D geometric cues (e.g., centers or bounding boxes) via region tokens before explicit geometric inference. SR-REAL begins with a cold-start supervised fine-tuning stage that constructs LOR and DTR chain-of-thought supervision and exposes a region-to-3D interface, followed by RL that optimizes the policy model with accuracy and format rewards; for DTR, a discrete center-based detection reward further refines geometric alignment. Across diverse spatial benchmarks, SR-REAL significantly outperforms spatial VLM baselines: (i) a single RL-trained model supports both reasoning paths, with DTR excelling in region-aware tasks through precise 3D localization and LOR enhancing general spatial reasoning; (ii) jointly training both paths fosters mutual reinforcement; (iii) high-quality, blended cold-start data is crucial for stable RL optimization; and (iv) the model generalizes across datasets and domains without per-task tuning, demonstrating positive transfer between LOR and DTR.

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

Multiple cyclicity and Wavelet Decomposition with Channel Correlation for Long-term Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.17996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cyclicity and trend are important components of time series data and many studies based on cyclicity and trend have achieved good results in long-term time series forecasting. However, we believe that current work neglects the influence of real-world inter-channel correlations in time series data which leads to suboptimal predictions. Furthermore, these models rely on complex designs to capture diverse information so that resulting in low computational efficiency. To address this challenge, we propose McWC, a long-term time series forecasting model that separately models the cyclicity, trend, and inter-channel correlations. Specifically, McWC first decouples cyclical information from data using a multi-layer cyclicity construction module. Then, it extracts inter-channel correlations using multi-layer perceptron. Next, it models and fuses the multi-layer high-frequency and low-frequency information from data using a multi-level wavelet decomposition module. Finally, it aggregates the results of different components to obtain the output. Simultaneously, we decouple intra-channel autocorrelations by calculating a loss function in the frequency domain. Experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate that McWC achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting excellent computational efficiency and historical information extraction capabilities.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

arXiv:2606.11901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially reproduced in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success and provide human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several dual-arm imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly in early interaction stages, parallel arm execution, and transfer between simulation and real-world settings. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for diagnosing these failure modes and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io/

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Investigating naming error patterns after non-invasive brain stimulation and language treatment in persons with aphasia

Abstract Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) paired with behavioral language therapy can improve naming in persons with aphasia (PWA), yet naming errors persist. Little is known about how naming error patterns change after non-invasive brain stimulation is combined with language treatment. Aims: To examine whether right cerebellar tDCS plus computerized aphasia therapy changes the types of naming errors in people with chronic aphasia across timepoints, and to determine whether effects differ by cerebellar tDCS polarity (anode vs. cathode). Methods and Procedures: In a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, within-subject crossover study, we retrospectively analyzed behavioral data from 24 individuals with post-stroke aphasia. Each participant completed two 15-session intervention periods (3-5 sessions/week) with active cerebellar tDCS + computerized aphasia therapy and sham + computerized aphasia therapy, separated by a two-month washout. General linear models (GLMs) assessed longitudinal changes in six error types (semantic, phonological real word, phonological nonword, no response, mixed, unrelated) on an untrained picture naming task (Philadelphia Naming Test; PNT) and a trained task (Naming 80; N80). Additional GLMs evaluated polarity effects with 2 (Group: anode vs. cathode) x 2 (Treatment) interactions, and treatment-order effects with 2 (Group: tDCS-first vs. sham-first) x 2 (Treatment) interactions. Outcomes and Results: Active cerebellar tDCS did not significantly change error types for trained items (N80). For untrained items (PNT), active tDCS reduced several error types relative to sham, with the clearest and most durable reduction in phonological nonword errors; more moderate reductions occurred for phonological real word and unrelated errors. Mixed errors showed a marginally opposite pattern, tending to increase after tDCS and decrease after sham. Polarity analyses indicated broadly similar effects across anodal and cathodal stimulation overall, but only the anode group showed a reliable treatment effect for phonological nonword errors on the PNT. Treatment-order analyses revealed no significant order effects. Conclusions: Our results indicate a shift in naming error types, particularly after tDCS treatment for the untrained naming task (PNT). These findings may help guide the course of treatment approaches of those with aphasia and what error naming pattern types may show changes post stroke when combining non-invasive brain stimulation and computerized aphasia therapy. Clinical Trial Registration: Cerebellar Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Aphasia Treatment [NCT02901574] Keywords: aphasia, naming errors, non-invasive brain stimulation, cerebellar tDCS, computerized aphasia treatment

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Decoding the Multimodal Maze: A Systematic Review on the Adoption of Explainability in Multimodal Attention-based Models

arXiv:2508.04427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal learning has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, particularly with the integration of attention-based models, leading to significant performance gains across a variety of tasks. Parallel to this progress, the demand for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has spurred a growing body of research aimed at interpreting the complex decision-making processes of these models. This systematic literature review analyzes research published between January 2020 and early 2024 that focuses on the explainability of multimodal models. Framed within the broader goals of XAI, we examine the literature across multiple dimensions, including model architecture, modalities involved, explanation algorithms and evaluation methodologies. Our analysis reveals that most studies are concentrated on vision-language and language-only models, with attention-based techniques being the most commonly employed for explanation. However, these methods often fall short in capturing the full spectrum of interactions between modalities, a challenge further compounded by the architectural heterogeneity across domains. Importantly, we find that evaluation methods for XAI in multimodal settings are largely non-systematic, lacking consistency, robustness, and consideration for modality-specific cognitive and contextual factors. To address these gaps, we not only synthesize findings from the surveyed works but also incorporate a complementary analysis that integrates recent and emerging advances driving multimodal explainability. Based on these insights, we provide a comprehensive set of recommendations aimed at promoting rigorous, transparent, and standardized evaluation and reporting practices in multimodal XAI research. Our goal is to support future research in more interpretable, accountable, and responsible multimodal AI systems, with explainability at their core.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Learning aligned EEG representations with subject-specific encoders

arXiv:2606.16462v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-subject EEG decoding promises more training data, but it also exposes neural networks to strong inter-subject distribution shifts. We study whether task supervision and architecture alone can learn subject-aligned representations. We replace a shared EEG encoder with subject-specific encoders followed by a common classifier, and compare this hybrid model with standard EEGNet, AttentionBaseNet, and CTNet baselines with Euclidean Alignment (EA) on four motor-imagery datasets. EA improves shared encoders by recentering subject covariances, but the hybrid encoder largely internalises this role: validation-loss curves and latent-distance analyses change little when EA is removed. Subject-specific heads increase class distinctiveness and place each subject close to its own latent manifold, improving most subjects while leaving a method-sensitive subset. These results support subject-specific encoders as a learned alignment mechanism for EEG decoding and identify head selection for unseen subjects as the remaining bottleneck.

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

VL-DINO: Leveraging CLIP Vision-Language Knowledge for Open-Vocabulary Object Detectio

Vision-language models like CLIP can provide rich semantic priors for open-vocabulary object detection. However, jointly integrating both textual and visual knowledge into detection architectures remains challenging. In this paper, we propose VL-DINO, an open-vocabulary detector that enhances DINO through more effective exploitation of CLIP's vision-language knowledge. Specifically, a Query-guided Positive Sample Construction (QPSC) module is first developed to construct additional high-quality positive samples, enabling the vanilla DINO framework to better accommodate mixed training across heterogeneous data sources while providing more vision-language alignment signals, thereby incorporating richer textual knowledge during training. A Visual Semantic Encoder (VSE) module is then introduced to distill CLIP visual knowledge into backbone-extracted features, producing fused features for subsequent encoder refinement. Based on the fused features, an Object-Region Semantic Alignment (ORSA) module extracts object-centric region features and aligns them with the corresponding textual embeddings, further incorporating textual cues. In the zero-shot setting, VL-DINO-T and VL-DINO-L achieve 36.3 and 38.1 AP on the LVIS benchmark, respectively, consistently outperforming prior advanced approaches. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and competitive performance of the proposed design.