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 (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Too long; didn't solve

arXiv:2604.07593v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mathematical benchmarks consisting of a range of mathematics problems are widely used to evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet little is known about how their structural properties influence model behaviour. In this work, we investigate two structural length variables, prompt length and solution length, and analyse how they relate to model performance on a newly constructed adversarial dataset of expert-authored mathematics problems. We find that both prompt and solution lengths correlate positively with increased model failure across models. We also include a secondary, exploratory analysis of cross-model disagreement. Under a difficulty-adjusted normalised analysis, both variables retain weak negative associations with realised model separation, slightly stronger for prompt length. Overall, our main robust finding is that structural length is linked to empirical difficulty in this dataset.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Style-CCL: Content-Preserving Style Transfer via Curriculum Continual Learning

Content-Preserving Style transfer, given content and style references, remains challenging for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) due to entangled content and style features. With a reverse triplet synthesis pipeline to build a million-scale training set and a dual-branch Style-Content DiT (SC-DiT) that decouples style and content via separate ROPE embeddings and causal masking, we observe that such a one-stage training paradigm on mixed style categories causes semantic styles to dominate, hindering texture style learning, and harming content preservation. To address these issues, we propose Style-CCL, a Multi-Stage Curriculum Continual Learning framework that trains SC-DiT from semantic (easy) to texture (hard) styles, and from clean to synthetic data, with Random Memory Rehearsal across stages to avoid catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Style-CCL achieves state-of-the-art performance in three core metrics: style similarity, content consistency, and aesthetic quality.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Sign-Rank, Index, and List Replicability: Connections and Separations

arXiv:2606.18236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In learning theory, the sign rank of a binary concept class captures the smallest dimension in which it can be represented by points and halfspaces. Despite tremendous interest, lower bounds on sign rank are notoriously difficult to come by. Two recent approaches to the problem establish lower bounds on sign rank by measures that are easier to analyze: the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index and the list replicability number. We order these measures, showing that the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index is upper-bounded by a linear function of the list replicability number. As a main consequence, we obtain a strong separation between sign rank and $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index, thereby resolving a question of Frick, Hosseini, and Vasileuski. This motivates a thorough study of list replicability, the stronger of the two lower-bounding measures. We establish upper bounds on the list replicability number by two combinatorial measures: height and minimum star number. We also prove a fundamental composition result, showing that the product of two concept classes has list replicability number bounded by the sum of the list replicability numbers of the two classes.

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

Decoupling Semantics from Distortions: Multi-Scale Two-Stream Vision-Language Alignment for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment

作者:

Existing vision-language model (VLM)-based AI-generated image quality assessment (AIGIQA) methods suffer from a fundamental semantic-distortion dimensional conflict: monolithic representations optimized for semantic discrimination inherently entangle compositional understanding with low-level perceptual sensitivity, rendering them blind to fine-grained quality degradations. We introduce MST-CLIPIQA, a multi-scale two-stream framework that achieves hierarchical vision-language alignment through explicit representational decoupling. Our architecture leverages dual CLIP encoders with complementary patch granularities: coarse-grained streams capture global semantic coherence while fine-grained streams preserve textural signatures and artifact patterns. An information bottleneck-inspired gated fusion mechanism performs adaptive cross-scale distillation, with optional cross-attention enabling prompt-anchored correspondence evaluation when generation prompts are available. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks establish new state-of-the-art results, achieving average improvements of 1.11 percent SRCC on quality and 2.35 percent SRCC on text-image correspondence prediction, while maintaining efficiency with only 0.8M trainable parameters. Our project is available at https://github.com/YMlinfeng/MST-CLIPIQA.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

From Trainee to Trainer: LLM-Designed Training Environment for RL with Multi-Agent Reasoning

Reinforcement learning pipelines for Large Language Model (LLM) training often rely on manually redesigned environments between stages, requiring practitioners to heuristically infer which configuration will best improve the current policy. To automate this process, we propose the LLM-as-Environment-Engineer framework in which the current policy model analyzes failure trajectories together with contextual information and proposes modifications to the next-stage training environment configuration. We also introduce MAPF-FrozenLake, a controllable testbed whose generator exposes multi-dimensional environment configurations, making it suitable for studying and benchmarking environment redesign. On this testbed, we condition the environment engineer on structured summaries of policy behavior, failure cases, and environment statistics, from which it produces the configuration for the next training stage. With Qwen3-4B as the backbone, our framework achieves the strongest aggregate performance on our benchmarks, outperforming larger proprietary LLMs (e.g., GPT, Gemini) and fixed-environment training baselines. We further analyze which forms of context are most effective, finding that successful environment updates rely on failure evidence and preserve configurations that already work. Interestingly, the current RL checkpoint serves as a better environment engineer than the original base model, suggesting that policy learning improves the model's ability to diagnose its remaining weaknesses.

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

Phase-Aware Guidance Injection for Recurrent MAPPO in Assembly-Line Disruption Recovery

arXiv:2606.16330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Disruption recovery in industrial assembly lines requires timely decisions under machine faults, worker absence, and emergency orders. Existing methods either rely on rigid handcrafted recovery logic or learn adaptive policies that do not readily exploit heterogeneous external recovery knowledge at decision time to reduce abnormal recovery time (ART) and preserve on-time delivery (OTD). To address this gap, we propose a phase-aware guidance injection framework that augments a trained recurrent MAPPO (RMAPPO) scheduling policy through logit-level action bias during evaluation. The framework provides a unified decision-time interface for rule-based, replay-based, and online LLM-based guidance, while activating intervention only during abnormal and recovery phases. Experiments on a custom AssemblyLineEnv show that high-quality rule guidance yields the strongest gains, replay-based guidance degrades smoothly under imperfect availability, and online LLM guidance still provides useful intermediate improvements. These results show that decision-time guidance injection can exploit heterogeneous recovery hints without redesigning the actor.

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

LLM Compression by Block Removal with Constrained Binary Optimization

In this paper, we formulate the compression of large language models (LLMs) by optimally deleting transformer blocks (``block removal'') as a constrained binary optimization (CBO) problem that can be mapped to a physical system (Ising glass), whose energies are a strong proxy for downstream model performance. This formulation enables an efficient ranking of a large number of candidate block-removal configurations yielding many high-quality, non-trivial solutions beyond those only removing consecutive regions. Our method performs strongly in the deep compression regime, such as for 50% compression of Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct, where we achieve an almost 23 percentage point increase on the MMLU benchmark compared to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) block-removal methods. For lighter compression, it performs on par with those methods across several benchmarks for Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Qwen3-14B (both before and after retraining), as well as Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. The approach is computationally efficient and requires only forward and backward passes on a calibration dataset for a few active parameters. Additionally, we demonstrate that using good heuristic solvers for the CBO problem provides solutions that perform well on downstream tasks in negligible runtime when it is unfeasible to solve the problem exactly. The method can be readily applied to any architecture. We illustrate this generality on the recent NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-FP8 model, which exhibits a highly inhomogeneous and challenging block structure, and where we outperform SOTA for AIME25 and GPQA when removing either 2 attention layers or 3 mixture-of-experts layers.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Sao Tome and Principe on the verge of eliminating lymphatic filariasis as a public health problem: evidence from IDA impact assessment surveys

Background Accelerated efforts to eliminate lymphatic filariasis (LF) as a public health problem have been supported by the introduction of the triple-drug regimen of ivermectin, diethylcarbamazine and albendazole (IDA) in endemic settings. In Sao Tome and Principe, nationwide mass drug administration (MDA) with diethylcarbamazine and albendazole was implemented in 2018, followed by IDA in 2019 and 2020. This study assesses progress towards elimination using post-MDA impact assessment surveys conducted after cessation of treatment. Methods Cross-sectional surveys were conducted among adults aged 20 years and older in 2022 and again between December 2024 and January 2025. Circulating filarial antigen (CFA) was detected using the filarial test strip (FTS). Individuals who tested positive were examined for microfilaremia using nocturnal calibrated thick blood smear microscopy. Additionally, programme data on MDA coverage and morbidity were obtained from national surveillance records. Results Three rounds of nationwide MDA achieved high epidemiological coverage (86.4% in 2018, 74.2% in 2019 and 80.0% in 2020). The impact assessment surveys conducted in 2022 evaluated 14 132 adults, with 21 individuals (0.15%) testing positive for CFA, while the follow-up survey conducted between December 2024 and January 2025 assessed 14 653 adults and detected seven positive cases (0.05%). No microfilariae were detected among the 28 antigen-positive individuals examined using nocturnal calibrated thick blood smears. National morbidity records documented 190 cases of lymphoedema and nine cases of hydrocoele. Conclusions Infection indicators remain well below WHO decision thresholds, suggesting that LF transmission is unlikely to be sustained. Sao Tome and Principe appears to be close to eliminating LF as a public health problem. However, strengthening morbidity management services will be essential to support the preparation of the national elimination dossier.

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

Multi-Rate Mixture of Experts for Accelerating Liquid Neural Network Training

arXiv:2606.12240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multivariate time-series data often exhibit complex temporal dependencies, irregular sampling, and heterogeneous dynamics across multiple time scales, making accurate sequence modeling particularly challenging. Traditional recurrent neural networks (RNNs), such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, operate in discrete time and may struggle to effectively capture continuous and irregular temporal behaviors. Liquid Neural Networks (LNNs) address some of these limitations through continuous-time dynamics, but standard LNN architectures typically rely on a single dynamical system, limiting their ability to model heterogeneous temporal patterns. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-Rate Mixture-of-Experts (MR-MoE) framework built on top of Liquid Neural Networks. In the proposed architecture, multiple LNN-based experts operate at distinct time scales, enabling the model to explicitly separate fast-changing dynamics from slow-evolving temporal trends. A gating network further enables adaptive expert specialization based on input conditions. In addition, we incorporate both feature-level and temporal attention mechanisms to improve robustness, interpretability, and long-range dependency modeling. Feature-level attention suppresses noisy or irrelevant variables, while temporal attention selectively focuses on informative historical states. We evaluate the proposed framework on a complex multivariate time-series prediction task and compare it against strong baselines, including LSTM, monolithic LNN, and standard MoE models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MR-MoE framework consistently achieves improved AUROC and AUPRC performance while maintaining favorable computational efficiency. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining continuous-time dynamics, multi-scale expert decomposition, and adaptive attention mechanisms for time-series modeling.

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

YeasierAgent: Agentic Social Sandbox as a Canvas for Intent-Driven Creation of Platform-Agnostic Symbiotic Agent-Native Applications

作者:

arXiv:2606.13722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces YeasierAgent, an application-building paradigm based on symbiotic agents, narrative worlds, and scene-aware interaction. It challenges the conventional device-coupled model of software by redefining applications as collaborative spaces among users, agents, and worlds. We present a system architecture that achieves two primary contributions: (1) enabling the rapid, cross-platform construction of agent-native applications by utilizing platform-agnostic interactive units (agents, scenes, dialogue) rather than fixed graphical layouts; and (2) unifying the emotional companionship and practical tool execution attributes of intelligent agents within a single experiential sandbox. By integrating automated generation, user-created worlds, and spatial multi-agent collaboration, YeasierAgent formalizes the category of Symbiotic Agent-Native Applications, demonstrating a shift from isolated, tool-specific chatbots toward cohesive, socially embedded computational environments.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

UniMM: A Unified Mixture Model Framework for Multi-Agent Simulation

arXiv:2501.17015v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Simulation plays a crucial role in assessing autonomous driving systems, where the generation of realistic multi-agent behaviors is a key aspect. In multi-agent simulation, the primary challenges include behavioral multimodality and closed-loop distributional shifts. In this study, we formulate a unified mixture model (UniMM) framework for generating multimodal agent behaviors, which can cover the mainstream methods including regression-based mixture models and discrete NTP models. Furthermore, we introduce a closed-loop sample generation approach tailored for mixture models to mitigate distributional shifts. Within the UniMM framework, we recognize critical configurations from both the model and data perspectives. We conduct a systematic examination of various model configurations, and comprehensively characterize their effects. Moreover, our investigation into the data configuration highlights the pivotal role of closed-loop samples in achieving realistic simulations. To extend the benefits of closed-loop samples across a broader range of mixture models, we further introduce a temporal disentanglement-and-alignment mechanism to address the shortcut learning and off-policy learning issues. Leveraging insights from our exploration, the distinct variants proposed within the UniMM framework, including discrete, anchor-free, and anchor-based models, all achieve state-of-the-art performance on the WOSAC benchmark.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

High-Risk Anti-Seizure Medication Use in Childbearing-Age People with Epilepsy in a Taenia solium Endemic Region

Background: People of childbearing potential with epilepsy in regions endemic for Taenia solium, where neurocysticercosis (NCC) is highly prevalent, represent a vulnerable population due to the elevated burden of epilepsy and resource limitations. Clinical practice in these settings remains poorly characterized. This study characterized anti-seizure medication (ASM) prescribing patterns by medication risk profiles among people of childbearing potential with epilepsy in Northern Peru, a region highly endemic for T. solium. Methods: Participants were drawn from a prospective, population-based epilepsy cohort in Tumbes, Peru (2006 to 2020). The analytic population included females with epilepsy aged 15 to 49 years. The primary outcome was pregnancy-associated ASM risk of congenital malformations and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. ASMs were classified as ''Established Low Risk'' (lamotrigine, levetiracetam), ''Possible Risk/Inadequate Data'' (carbamazepine, phenobarbital, phenytoin), and ''Established High Risk'' (valproic acid). Prescription patterns were examined in relation to demographic and clinical characteristics. Results: Among 1,975 individuals with epilepsy, 685 were people of childbearing potential. Approximately 34.9% met criteria for probable or definite NCC. Most ASM prescriptions were in the ''Possible Risk/Inadequate Data'' category (87.0%), and 12.8% received ''Established High Risk'' medications. In multivariable analysis, high-risk prescribing was associated with prior ASM use and polytherapy. Discussion: People of childbearing potential with epilepsy were predominantly treated with carbamazepine, phenytoin, phenobarbital, and valproate, reflecting local ASM availability. Despite evidence supporting lamotrigine and levetiracetam in pregnancy, prescribing patterns reflect local formulary constraints. These findings highlight a gap between guideline recommendations and real-world prescribing in resource-limited settings, underscoring the need for context-specific treatment strategies.

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

Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scanners

Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based systems. Through an empirical study of existing skill scanners, we find that current defenses primarily rely on textual descriptions, manifests, and source code as the main signals for security analysis, which can leave visually conveyed malicious intent insufficiently examined. This creates a practical blind spot: harmful operational instructions hidden in images may bypass scanning while still being recoverable by multimodal agents during deployment. To systematically investigate this threat, we propose SkillCamo, a document-mediated multimodal instruction attack that conceals malicious instructions within images bundled with a skill while rewriting the surrounding documentation to naturally reference those images as part of the normal workflow. Thus, the attack does not rely on the image alone, but on the joint interpretation of textual guidance and visual payload at execution time. To defend against such attacks, we further propose ExecScan, an execution-grounded multimodal scanning module that performs intent extraction, behavior reconstruction, abuse assessment, and deliberative execution simulation over skill artifacts. ExecScan jointly analyzes documentation, code, referenced resources, and visual content to recover hidden instructions, reconstruct executable behavior chains, and identify downstream risks such as exfiltration, destruction, persistence, deception, and privilege escalation. Extensive experiments show that image-hidden malicious instructions challenge existing skill scanners, while ExecScan can improve the skill scanning performance.

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

A Critical Look at Targeted Instruction Selection: Disentangling What Matters (and What Doesn't)

arXiv:2602.14696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task. Despite growing interest, the literature on targeted instruction selection remains fragmented and opaque: methods vary widely in selection budgets, often omit zero-shot baselines, and frequently entangle the contributions of key components. As a result, practitioners lack actionable guidance on selecting instructions for their target tasks. In this work, we aim to bring clarity to this landscape by disentangling and systematically analyzing the two core ingredients: data representation and selection algorithms. Our framework enables controlled comparisons across models, tasks, and budgets. We find that only gradient-based data representations choose subsets whose similarity to the query consistently predicts performance across datasets, models, and candidate pools. While no single method dominates, gradient-based representations paired with greedy round-robin selection often perform best on average at low budgets, but these gains diminish at larger budgets. Finally, we unify several existing selection algorithms as forms of approximate distance minimization between the selected subset and the query set, and support this view with new generalization bounds. More broadly, our findings provide critical insights and a foundation for more principled data selection in LLM fine-tuning. The code is available at https://github.com/dcml-lab/targeted-instruction-selection.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Reward Hacking in Language Model Agents: Revisiting AI Safety Gridworlds

arXiv:2606.15385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reward hacking, where AI systems exploit misspecified objectives to achieve high reward without satisfying intended goals, remains a central challenge in AI safety. Yet most known instances have been discovered post hoc in frontier systems where controlled study is impractical. We adapt the AI Safety Gridworlds framework into a text-based evaluation suite that reformulates classic reinforcement learning safety tasks for language-based agents. Across frontier and mid-scale models, we find that specification gaming emerges zero-shot: models systematically achieve high observed reward while underperforming on hidden safety objectives, and even apparently safe behaviors can reflect misunderstanding rather than principled safety. Reinforcement learning does not correct these failures: direct reward optimization widens the gap between observed and hidden reward, as the model's initial competence causes it to lock into locally rewarding strategies before discovering safer alternatives. This pattern persists across model scales (1.5B–14B) and is not resolved by finer credit assignment, exploration prompts, or entropy regularization. Our results show that reward hacking arises naturally when optimizing proxy objectives with capable language model agents and resists standard mitigations, suggesting that proxy-reward failures in agentic settings may require approaches beyond standard exploration and credit-assignment fixes. To facilitate reproducibility, the code for this work is available at \href{https://github.com/asparius/verl-agent-safety}{our public repository}.

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

Cross-Modal Masked Compositional Concept Modeling for Enhancing Visio-Linguistic Compositionality

Contrastively trained vision-language models like CLIP, have made remarkable progress in learning joint image-text representations, but still face challenges in compositional understanding. They often exhibit a "bag-of-words" behavior–struggling to capture the object relations, attribute-object bindings, and word order dependencies. This limitation arises not only from the reliance on global, single-vector representations for optimization, but also from the insufficient exploitation and modeling of the rich compositional information inherently present in paired image text data. In this work, we propose MACCO (MAsked Compositional Concept MOdeling), a framework that masks compositional concepts in one modality and reconstructs them conditioned on the full contextual information from the other, enabling the model to capture and align cross-modal compositional structures more effectively. To facilitate this process, we introduce two auxiliary objectives that jointly align and regularize masked features both inter-modally and intra-modally. Extensive experiments on five compositional benchmarks, along with in-depth analyses, demonstrate that our approach not only significantly enhances compositionality in VLMs but also improves their ability to capture syntactic structure and linguistic information. Additionally, the improved compositionality also benefits text-to-image generation and multimodal large language model. Code is available at https://github.com/hiker-lw/MACCO.

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

TopoCap: Learning Topology-Agnostic Motion Priors for Monocular Video-to-Animation

The explosion of generative 3D assets has created a massive demand for animation, yet current motion capture methods remain brittle, restricted to species-specific templates (e.g., SMPL) or requiring labor-intensive manual rigging. We introduce TopoCap, the first unified framework capable of extracting motion from monocular video and retargeting it onto characters with arbitrary, unseen skeletal topologies, i.e., from bipeds to hexapods and inanimate objects, without test-time optimization. Our key insight is that while skeletal structures are combinatorial and discrete, the underlying physics of motion occupy a continuous, low-dimensional manifold. We materialize this insight via a two-stage generative pipeline. First, we learn a Universal Motion Manifold using a Graph CVAE that compresses heterogeneous kinematic chains into a shared, fixed-length latent code. By explicitly conditioning the decoder on a structural embedding of the target rig, we disentangle motion dynamics from skeletal topology. Second, we treat video-to-animation as a conditional flow matching problem, predicting these topology-agnostic codes from visual features. To learn this generalized prior, we introduce Mobjaverse, a massive-scale dataset curated from Objaverse-XL. Comprising over 5,000 unique skeletal topologies and 2 million frames, it exceeds the structural diversity of existing datasets by two orders of magnitude. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \MethodMotion outperforms specialist models on human and quadruped benchmarks while enabling zero-shot retargeting for the long tail of 3D creatures. Dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/duckduckplz/Mobjaverse.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Analytic Bijections for Smooth and Interpretable Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2601.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A key challenge in normalizing flows is finding expressive invertible scalar bijections. Existing approaches face trade-offs: affine transformations are smooth and analytically invertible but lack expressivity; monotonic splines offer local control but are only piecewise smooth and act on bounded domains; residual flows achieve smoothness but need numerical inversion. We introduce three families of analytic bijections that are globally smooth ($C^\infty$), defined on all of $\mathbb{R}$, and analytically invertible in closed form, combining the favorable properties of prior approaches. Beyond serving as drop-in replacements in coupling flows, where they match or exceed spline performance, we develop radial flows: a novel architecture using direct parametrization that transforms the radial coordinate while preserving angular direction. Radial flows exhibit exceptional training stability, produce geometrically interpretable transformations, and on targets with radial structure can achieve comparable quality to coupling flows with $1000\times$ fewer parameters. We provide comprehensive evaluation on 1D and 2D benchmarks, and demonstrate applicability to higher-dimensional physics problems through experiments on $\phi^4$ lattice field theory, where our bijections outperform affine baselines and enable problem-specific designs that address mode collapse.

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

The Algorithmic-Human Manager: AI, Apps, and Workers in the Indian Gig Economy

arXiv:2606.19975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines the impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on the blue-collar gig economy in India, focusing on algorithmic management. This paper examines the impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on the blue collar gig economy in India, focusing on algorithmic management he use of automated systems to allocate, monitor, and evaluate work in location-based services such as ride sharing and delivery. Using a social justice framework and a mixed-methods approach comprising interviews with 16 gig workers and 21 key stakeholders, the study uncovers a dual reality: while AI-powered systems expand access to work and generate operational efficiencies, they simultaneously introduce significant challenges related to fairness, transparency, and worker dignity. Key findings reveal that algorithmic systems are opaque by design, produce inequitable outcomes, and are not structured to reward additional labour with proportionate pay. The study advocates for a pragmatic hybrid governance model an Algorithmic Human Manager framework in which technological efficiency and human accountability operate together rather than in opposition. The findings carry implications for policymakers, platform companies, and civil society organizations working to design equitable AI governance frameworks for the gig economy in India and across the Global South.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Construction of ergodic IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$

arXiv:2506.10476v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove the existence of infinite-volume IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ , with $d \geq 2$, based on a multi-source IDLA protocol. Unlike IDLA aggregates, the laws of the IDLA forests studied here depend on the trajectories of particles, and then do not satisfy the famous Abelian property. Their existence is due to a stabilization result (Theorem 1.1, our main result) that we establish using percolation tools. Although the sources are infinitely many, we also prove that each of them play the same role in the building procedure, which results in an ergodicity property for the IDLA forests (Theorem 1.2).

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

DP-Hype: Federated Differentially Private Hyperparameter Search

arXiv:2510.04902v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tuning hyperparameters in federated machine learning can substantially impact model performance. When hyperparameters are tuned on sensitive data, privacy becomes an important challenge and to this end, differential privacy has emerged as the de facto standard for provable privacy. A standard setting in federated learning is that clients agree on a shared setup, i.e., find a compromise from a set of hyperparameters, like a model's learning rate. Yet, prior work on privacy-preserving hyperparameter tuning is tailored to specific learning tasks, does not account for the privacy leakage of aggregated results, or offers a sub-optimal privacy-utility trade-off. In this work, we present our algorithm DP-Hype, which performs a federated and privacy-preserving hyperparameter search by conducting a federated voting based on local hyperparameter evaluations of clients. In this way, DP-Hype selects hyperparameters that lead to a compromise supported by a majority of clients, while maintaining scalability and independence from specific learning tasks. We prove that DP-Hype preserves the strong notion of differential privacy called client-level differential privacy and, importantly, show that its privacy guarantees do not depend on the number of hyperparameters. We also provide bounds on its utility guarantees, that is, the probability of finding good hyperparameters, and implement DP-Hype as a submodule in the popular Flower framework for federated machine learning. In addition, we evaluate performance on multiple benchmark data sets in iid as well as multiple non-iid settings and demonstrate high utility of DP-Hype even under small privacy budgets.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Enhancing Underwater Light Field Images via Global Geometry-aware Diffusion Process

This work studies the challenging problem of acquiring high-quality underwater images via 4-D light field (LF) imaging. To this end, we propose GeoDiff-LF, a novel diffusion-based framework built upon SD-Turbo to enhance underwater 4-D LF imaging by leveraging its spatial-angular structure. GeoDiff-LF consists of three key adaptations: (1) a modified U-Net architecture with convolutional and attention adapters to model geometric cues, (2) a geometry-guided loss function using tensor decomposition and progressive weighting to regularize global structure, and (3) an optimized sampling strategy with noise prediction to improve efficiency. By integrating diffusion priors and LF geometry, GeoDiff-LF effectively mitigates color distortion in underwater scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods across both visual fidelity and quantitative performance, advancing the state-of-the-art in enhancing underwater imaging. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/linlos1234/GeoDiff-LF.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Transposable elements as evolutionary substrates of proteindisorder in the human proteome

Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are central contributors to protein function, evolution and human disease, yet the evolutionary routes that seed new disordered segments within pre-existing proteins are still poorly understood. Sequence insertions provide a powerful mechanism for disorder expansion, but the genomic donors of inserted IDR and its long-term conformational fate remain largely unknown. Transposable elements (TEs), abundant mobile genetic elements with distinctive compositional biases, represent compelling candidates for generating disorder within proteins. Here, we systematically mapped TE-derived segments across human proteins and isoforms, and we found that these insertions are strongly enriched in intrinsic disorder. The structural consequences of their insertion are shaped by TE class and family, reflecting the sequence biases of the elements from which they originate. Recent, Primate specific insertions preferentially generate disordered segments, whereas older insertions more frequently occupy ordered structural contexts, revealing an age-dependent transition in the conformational state of TE-derived sequences. TE-containing isoforms are expressed at lower levels than TE-free isoforms, particularly when insertions are young and disorder-rich, suggesting that intrinsic disorder may constrain the cellular tolerance of newly exonized sequences. These findings identify TEs as a major evolutionary mechanism linking genome mobility to the emergence of new disordered conformational ensembles in the human proteome.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Beyond the Training Distribution: Evaluating Predictions Under Distribution Shift and Selection Bias

arXiv:2606.14506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding how a prediction model will perform in a new environment before deployment is essential to preventing harm when algorithms inform decision-making. Two common sources of model performance degradation are (i) covariate shift, where the target covariate distribution differs from the source, and (ii) selective labels, where the observability of outcomes depends on historical decisions. We study pre-deployment model evaluation under the joint presence of covariate shift and labeling of outcomes selectively based on observed features. In particular, we present a double machine learning procedure for estimating the target risk of an arbitrary black-box prediction model under a general loss function. We show identification of this estimand under standard assumptions and derive a bias-corrected estimator based on the influence function of the target risk. Finally, we evaluate our estimator through experiments using the eICU electronic health records database, showing that it tracks the true target risk more accurately than methods that address either selective labels or covariate shift alone, as well as baselines that combine standard plug-in approaches.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly capable, yet their safety lags behind. This creates a gap between what agents can do and should do. This gap widens as agents engage in multi-turn interactions and employ diverse tools, introducing new risks overlooked by existing benchmarks. To systematically scale safety testing into multi-turn, tool-realistic settings, we propose a principled taxonomy that transforms single-turn harmful tasks into multi-turn attack sequences. Using this taxonomy, we construct MT-AgentRisk (Multi-Turn Agent Risk Benchmark), the first benchmark to evaluate multi-turn tool-using agent safety. Our experiments reveal substantial safety degradation: the Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases by 16% on average across open and closed models in multi-turn settings. To close this gap, we propose ToolShield, a training-free, tool-agnostic, self-exploration defense: when encountering a new tool, the agent autonomously generates test cases, executes them to observe downstream effects, and distills safety experiences for deployment. Experiments show that ToolShield effectively reduces ASR by 30% on average in multi-turn interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/CHATS-lab/ToolShield.